Life in the Magdalen Islands 1911

Life in the Magdalen Islands.

BY W. LACEY AMY.

From The Wide World Magazine 1911, July (presumed), source eBay photo of GB edition.

It is safe to say that very few readers of “The Wide World Magazine” have ever heard of the Magdalen Islands. They belong to Canada, yet not one Canadian in ten has any knowledge of them. Situated in the centre of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, ice-bound in winter and storm-beset at other seasons, they are entirely cut off from the outside world for many months of the year. Mr. Amy gives a very interesting account of the quaint, easy-going islanders, very few of whom have ever left their native shores.

MANY a tourist thinks that he has seen Canada when he has taken the five-day trip from Halifax to Victoria, or the still shorter “transcontinental” from boat to boat—Montreal to Vancouver. A Canadian will laugh at such a claim, and furnish as justification those interest­ing sections never seen on such journeys—the wonderful valleys of the Maritime Provinces, the quaint villages of French Quebec, the newly-discovered wealth of Northern Ontario, the productive plains in the Western Provinces, far from the view of the railways, and the fruit and ranch-lands hidden away between the mountain ranges of British Columbia.

It takes months to cover Canada; it takes years to know it. And even the native Canadian has only just begun to realize the wealth of his country and the out-of-the-way places that make this great dominion a veritable book of revelations.

The great Annapolis Valley and the Metapedia

End of page 1 of 7.

The Women of The Magdalens

The Women of The Magdalens

W. Lacey Amy

MacLean’s, JULY 1 1911

Photos by the Author

 MANLIKE I concluded that I thoroughly understood the women of those lonely islands in the centre of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, right after my first experience with one of them. I had promised a frankly-requesting Frenchman to take a picture of his new house, with his wife and family in front of it, in order that he might be able to show his wandering brother on the mainland that things were prospering with him. It was, of course, no surprise to me that the wife should not be ready when I called; so that, after I had arranged the husband and one child with all the solemnity of a gallery effort, I waited patiently for the woman to appear. Finally I asked for her.

“She’s not coming,” he replied in his broken English.

“That’s too bad,” I answered indefinitely.

“She hasn’t her best dress on.”

“Oh, I’ll wait for her,” I offered, stooping down to pick the wild strawberries, just then ripe, a month after they had disappeared from Ontario tables.

“But it is not finished yet,” he protested.

That ended it. Nothing short of her best dress, which was not yet finished, was going to appear in the picture he would send to his brother on the mainland. But just then she hurried from the back door and I snapped the shutter.

Later another side of the Magdalen feminine was revealed.

“Follow the beach road,” was the direction I had received from the woman who served me with milk, cream and buttermilk, in large jugs at each meal. The direction was to lead me to the captain of the Government tug, which plies around the islands.

The injunction was specific enough, so I followed the first road that led to the beach. In fact, I followed, but with waning zeal, half a dozen of those uncertain tracks that ended in the sea. At last I discovered two women, and an uncounted number of children pulling weeds in a small garden patch, and, remembering the shyness of the first woman, I approached with most reassuring manner, and asked for something sufficiently definite in directions to prevent my covering the whole island like a census-taker.

These women did not shrink. Instead, they looked up, rose to their feet, ignored my question, and turned to each other to discuss in French the latest gossip. I thought I saw my mistake, and tried French, but after a moment’s splutter I found myself staring idiotically into eyes which looked me up and down with the calmness of women at a costume exhibition. My coat collar was turned down, that I knew—for I had parted from the Woman-who-worries in the best of feeling; and my tie was of that loose, summery kind, which is most effective when misplaced. Yet I felt, however, as if I should turn myself around, as the owner does in selling a horse.

A few yards further a woman attempted to give me directions in English. I had still a quarter of a mile to go, she said. A mile further another woman made the same estimate. By the time I had reached the captain three miles further along I had come to the conclusion that I had been too hasty in forming my conclusions when a Magdalen Islands woman kept me waiting until she was dressed in her best. To be sure, she was shy and proud, but she was also frankly interested and bold, garrulous, critical and able to make the other sex feel like mere men; and there was nothing under the sun she could not guess at if she did not know it. And as I pulled the peg from the captain’s gate it came to me with a great burst of radiance, that the woman of the Magdalens was just a woman, after all. There was some relief in understanding that one could never understand her.

The only fact about the Magdalen women which is certain of support on all occasions is the size of her family. Le Bourdais, the legless telegraph operator on the Islands, turned up his nose at the size of families; but then he was prejudiced. “Pooh!” he sneered between puffs. “Seventeen is the largest family we have, and” —he reflected a moment to add the weight of thoughtful consideration—“there are not very many of them more than fifteen. I took off my hat surreptitiously to the fifteen. Le Bourdais had come from the mainland of Quebec. “Friend of mine over there,” he resumed, by way of explanation of his contempt for seventeen, “one of a family of twenty-two, married a woman from a family of twenty-seven. They have nineteen themselves already.” Then he came hastily to the defence of his friend: “And he’s a young man, yet.”

I went out humbly and counted a nearby pile of lobster traps to get an idea of twenty-seven in one group.

What they do in the families of respectable size I can not see. The parents of the seventeens and fifteens on the Magdalens are now overtaxed for names. So there may happen to be a trifle like a score of youngsters of the same name in the one village, and to make sure of washing the faces of the right ones at night, distinction is made by throwing in the father’s name somewhere with the son’s. Joe Anizim Burke is Joe Burke, the son of Anizim Burke. Joe Burke P. is the tag attached to Joe, the son of Peter; and he was not Joe Peter Burke, nor even Joe Burke Peter. But the mothers are too busy raising them to stop to think of new names—and if it were left to the father he would be working in “Cod,” or “Mackerel,” or “Haddock,” or “Herring,” or some such name descriptive of the limits of his imagination.

With all these family cares, the women find time to attend to their work—which means more than washing dishes, hunting bargains and studying the hair-dressers’ windows. They do not know what bargains and hairdressers are. It is an unwritten law that man was made to fish, and woman to do the rest. Coming in from the sea in the fish boat—the man’s home—the woman clutches the sides, fixes her eyes on the cross-bar in front of her, and prays quietly until the bottom grates on the pebbles. Then she goes to the farm, plows, reaps, gardens, does the housework, spanks those of the fifteen who are not away fishing, and in her spare time hitches up the little French pony to the “charette” and digs clams for the next day’s fishing. At night she walks down to the fish-house on the sandbar, where her lord lives through the summer, and has the meal prepared for him on his return from the fishing grounds.

These fish-houses are a sort of two-storey stable. In the ground apartment is a miscellaneous collection of bait, decaying fish heads, lobster traps, nets, salt, and other odoriferous necessities of the profession. Above the single board ceiling is the drawing-room, which is also kitchen, diningroom and bedroom. The sitting-room is the steps leading on the outside to this second story. Sometimes it serves as the bathroom as well, as I discovered when batches of the fifteen, unembarassed, were lined up for cleansing operations.

Even the turning of the cod on the flakes is the work of the women. Groups of men delight to stand around these flakes on a day too stormy to fish, and watch the girls and women staggering under the heaped carriers. They even allow their wives to dig the bait while they smoke and lazily clean up their boats.

But some of the younger women retain the feminine instinct. With the Woman-who-worries I had walked to Etang du Nord, on the north side of Grindstone Island, to secure some fishing scenes. In that village there was no striking inducement for a woman who was not broken in, to wander further along the shore than the edge of the houses. The Norder has the uncomfortable habit of cleaning his fish on the shore and trusting to the tide to scavenge. But its scavenger corps evidently lacks organization and system, judging from the two-foot bank of fish cleanings that maintains a permanent division between the high and the low-tide driveways.

To the Woman-who-worries, remaining alone beyond the fish-cleaning lines, there came tripping down with feminine pride a young woman, conspicuously arrayed for the occasion in striking waist and huge lace collar. Only a few minutes previously she had been visible at a door in typical fish-wife garb. But now she approached with all the confidence of her distinctive attire, and calmly surveyed the mainland costume. A young man rose from the steps of a bait-house and walked briskly across to the two women.

“That your man?” he asked, pointing along the shore to me.

The Woman-who-worries was forced under the circumstances to acknowledge me.

“That’s my girl!” he said proudly, nodding at the gay waist. And the girl preened herself and turned to expose a new elevation.

But there are other women on the Islands. Over at Amherst live four sisters, the only English women on that Island. For years unknown in number to ordinary knowledge, they and their parents have dwelt on the same point of land—Shea’s Point, it is called, after them. All around the Point the four sisters can look down upon the remnants of wrecks that have blown ashore before their eyes for many years, in the wild storms of the Gulf. For forty years, and more, they and their mother have provided the only accommodation for visitors; and in token of it they show with pride an ancient, velvet-backed autograph album that has been the only register of kind words left them. They are not young, but their hospitality remains fresher than their faces. It never grows stiff, or weak, or weary, as their old bones shall some day.

Their father was a fish merchant, the squire of the Island, but at his death, his daughters could not continue the fish business, and so the eldest has taken for her special care the old store, where she makes her share of the expenses by dealing out candy, spools and groceries. Her stock is not large, but the other stores see that she never runs out of supplies.

When the ill-fated Lunenburg, the predecessor of the present steamship, left Amherst on the trip that was unwillingly changed from the second last one of the season to its last for all time, Mary Shea enquired anxiously of the owner of the boat what she would do if the boat was unable to get back from the mainland before winter.

“Rest assured, we’ll get back,” he answered lightly.

But Mary was not satisfied. She had seen many Magdalen winters.

And Leslie, to relieve her anxiety, turned to the manager of his store. “If we should not get back, give Mary all she wants,” he ordered. Thus the old store was not closed that winter.

“And,” concluded Mary, as she told me of that terrible wreck off West Point lighthouse, “you could travel the four globes and not find a nicer man.”

The sisters have erected a new three storey house just above the old one, but nothing would induce them to tear down the squatty old affair their father built and their mother adorned. In imitation of the prints they have seen of modern summer hotels, the new one has a verandah across the entire front, approached by imposing steps and backed by a glass surrounded door. It is the largest house on the Islands, as befits the dignity of its use; and within its parlor is one of the two or three organs that have been the marvel of the Islanders. Even before I looked at the titles of the sheets of music on the rack, I knew what I would find: “Sweet Marie,” “He Never Smiled Again,” “Break the News to Mother,” “My Sweetheart Went Down With the Maine,” “After the Ball,” “In the Gloaming,” “Kathleen Mavourneen,” and the “Maiden’s Prayer.” The organ was never heard during my visit, but the tone it gave the surroundings was considered sufficient to justify its presence.

On every piece of furniture was a “tidy,” on the floors were thick, variegated, hooked rugs, on the rugs were handworked foot-stools, and on the wall a design of roses worked out in sea shells. One of the sisters attended to the wants of her few guests; the others cooked in a small detached shanty, weeded vegetables and carried the water from the old pump in the older house.

It was a pleasant place to rest, from the eight o’clock breakfast bell to the golden sunset, and on into the gleaming moonlight. Just before the sun set behind the low sandbar far away across Pleasant Bay, one of the sisters would scurry around after a few gadabout turkeys, reluctant to leave the evening peace. A lamb bleated plaintively from its rope fastening near the edge of the cliff, and another sister ran to calm it with a tin of water. That lamb was destined to supply the winter’s meat, and its inmortant position in the household economy could not be neglected. A cow stood hopelessly gazing from the only unfenced side of its field, down, down, sixty feet to the ocean’s edge, where the ugly ribs of the wrecked hulls lay waiting for the storm to tear away a few more planks.

Later, we sat on the verandah, in a moonlight that rivalled the day. The large, yellow orb looked down on the sleeping Island from the southeast, casting a lonesome radiance full of shadows over the anchored fishing fleet. Below us the fishhouses were wrapped in early slumber. A charette rattled clumsily down the road, the little pony lazily responding to the woman returning over-late from the farm work. One of the Shea sisters crept quietly out of the shadows by the gate on her way back from the Catholic church where she had been preparing for the next day’s services; her “nice, fine evening,” and “good night” were what we had been waiting for before retiring.

A wind blew, strong, through the bedroom window, but its mildness enticed to one last look over Pleasant Bay in the wonderful moonlight. Just a stone’s throw distant two old masts protruded from the water, silent reminders of other conditions, when the moon did not shine, and the water was rippling to more than a summer breeze. Out there, a dark shadow glided slowly along in the moonlight and stopped. For a moment it swung; and then the side-lights of an anchored boat told of the fisherman who had wandered to over-distant fishing grounds, and was willing to risk his boat under the cliffs to save the time of tacking into the fishing harbor further over.

Four hours later, at one in the morning, the fish-houses would be alive again with fishermen preparing for the day’s fishing. And the women would hurriedly clean up the breakfast dishes, hitch the ponies and hasten to their tasks on the farms.

The Magdalen Islands, Part 2

The Magdalen Islands, Part 2

The Quaint People of the Lonely Islands

By W. Lacey Amy

From The Canadian Magazine, March, 1911. Digitized by Doug Frizzle, January 2016.

While looking around for a map of the Islands, I came across this great blog on Magdalen Islands /drf

THE memories that cling to one after a holiday on the Magdalen Islands, those far-east insular possessions of Canada, are not of the scenery, nor of the accommodation, nor even of the purity of the breezes unsullied by any of the products of modern industry and haste. It is the remembrance of the people themselves that recalls the visit with pleasure, carrying with it even yet a tinge of the peace and tranquillity that hangs over everything from Amherst to “Old Harry,” and wraps the visitor in an atmosphere of rest and quiet happiness.

Long in my memory will remain the eagerness of the simple, kind-hearted Islanders to give the “writer-man” little bits of history and incident, after one of them happened to catch me making notes. For some time I was glad to return this kindness by turning my camera on scenes interesting only to the one making the request, jotting down the name and address that I might send back the completed photograph after I had developed my plates.

My first experience of their knowledge of the use of the leather case I carried was when a Frenchman sidled up to me on the road with the ques­tion in very broken English: “ ’Scuse me, you the picture-man?”

When I grasped his meaning and confessed, he followed it up without hesitation.

“Started yet?”

I admitted I had.

“What you charge to take pictures of my house and me and my family?”

I told him I would be glad to send him a few prints without charge.

“But you not down here to make money that way?” he answered politely.

My offer was almost my undoing. Like everything on the Island the news must have spread rapidly that there was someone there who would take pictures for nothing. After I had taken a half-dozen on the same terms, in answer to the same ques­tion of how much I would charge, I was forced to deceive my trusting friends in order to protect myself from running out of plates and film packs. Having a plate camera, I was able to go through all the ceremony of arranging the subject, viewing it from every angle, carefully adjusting the focus, manipulating the tripod, and pressing the bulb with the click that told them it was all over—but the slide was not removed.

It was characteristic of the impression their confidence and trust imparted that I should feel like a criminal every time I did it, while they washed up the faces of at least a portion of the children, gave me their names to enter in my note-book, and repaid me with a closer inspection of the baby or by remaining around to forestall any such desire I might feel.

In my list of names there are many curiosities that are peculiar to the Magdaleners. One man, the one who is standing so stiff and straight in the fish-splitting picture, is called Joe Burke, P. As the only man available who could speak a word of English I had some difficulty in understanding that the “P” stands for Peter in his father’s name, there being several Joe Burkes. Another of the same name is called Joe Anizim Burke, the middle name being that of his father.

After all, the Islander is a French-Canadian; that is why the population of the Islands is increasing so rapidly that some must soon get out into the world. One woman whose picture I was taking brought only three children into the centre front.

“How is it,” I asked with the careless freedom that comes so easily down there, “how is it that you have such a small family compared with your neighbours?”

“We’ve only been married four years,” she answered in hasty defence.

I apologised.

But one occupation is known to the Islanders—fishing in its various branches, including sealing and trapping lobsters. Between times a little farming can scarcely be termed an occupation. Sealing is the most picturesque and dangerous of the efforts of the Magdaleners to add to their season’s earnings. In the early spring, while the ice-floes are breaking up, the seals come close to the shore and the promise of a few pelts, the first of the year’s earnings, sends many a fisherman to his death. The shifting winds break up the floes without warning, and unless the fishermen can reach shore in their tiny seal-boats, a combination sleigh and boat, which they drag after them on the ice, they are never heard of again.

And even when they escape the certain death of drifting floes they may return with the first stages of the throat and lung troubles that are so disastrous on the Islands, swept as they are with the cold, damp winds of winter and spring.

Each year the catch of seal is diminishing with more or less regularity. At one time the catch for the whole Islands amounted to 45,000, and the pelts were worth four and a half cents a pound. Last, spring (1910) only 4.000 were caught, worth one and a half cents a pound, the fat of all of which is being tried out in the vats shown in one of the illustrations. In 1909 the quick breaking up of the ice prevented the capture of any. But in 1908, with the ice going out slowly, the catch was the best for many years—17,000 pelts. But even in this, so early in his year’s work, the Islander is at a disadvantage. Working from the shore with but his tiny seal-boat, and controlled by the state of the weather, he is forced to stand on the shore and watch the Newfoundland steam sealers run along the outer edge of the floes, killing as they go, securing the bulk of the seal long before the Magdalener dare venture out. Last spring one Newfoundland boat killed 30,000 seal and could secure but 13,000, as the ice broke up before it could collect them.

The plan of sealing is to kill the seal, erect a stake topped with cloth over the pile, and continue the killing until a load is secured, leaving the collecting until this is accomplished. It would be a just protection for the Islanders were they insured their own seal by prohibiting outside sealers.

After the seal are gone, except the bay seal that swim gracefully around the bays all year, the fisherman turns to the herring. Ten or a dozen invest in a seine boat and work together with large seine nets. All of these boats from one harbour place their earnings in a common fund and di­vide at the end of the season. Last spring the boats at Amherst made $300 each, which, divided among a dozen men, means little for their work. The herring caught are largely sold to the Bankers (fishermen from the Banks of Newfoundland), or the trawlers (the steam fishermen of the outer waters), at eighty cents to a dollar a barrel, or to the smokers at fifty cents a barrel.

The lobster season continues for two months to the first week in July and again for a month in the fall. The Magdalen Islands arc probably the best lobster grounds in the world, due somewhat to the enforcement of the closed season by a Government tug, and partially to the dislike of the Islander for breaking the law or any­thing else that requires unusual exertion. Out of season the shores are piled with the lobster traps, conven­ient for setting out in the bottom of the ocean at the next season. Lobster factories dot the coast, all under the control, as in the entire fishing industry, of a few merchants who have made themselves wealthy through the simplicity of the fisherman.

The fishing is confined entirely to cod and mackerel, the former being the stand-by, but the latter the choice fish. And here again the fishermen show their preference for the easier task. There is not any more money in mackerel, but the fishing is lighter when a four-pound fish is at the end of the line than if it were a fifty-pound cod. Every day after the mackerel season opens the fishermen first try for mackerel, and only failing in that do they change their bait and re­sign themselves to the other fish that are just waiting to be pulled out.

One day I watched as a day’s catch of 3,200 pounds of cod, worth $40, was weighed out; but the fishermen looked longingly at their neighbour’s catch of mackerel, worth less than half their own day’s work. Perhaps it was because the mackerel is such a pretty, clean fish compared with the flabby phlegmatic cod.

Unsensitive as one is to it when there, viewed from the standpoint of Western life the Islander is slow of action, of ambition and of thought. And combined with this there is a sur­prising cowardice on the water. One is inclined to think that the failure of the fishermen to take advantage of what appears to be a fine day for fishing is that it will allow them to loaf picturesquely around the cod flakes, while the girls carry and turn the drying cod, or leisurely paint a new water-line on their little boats. A cloud in the sky, an imitation thunderstorm at the time the boats leave in the early morning, or a wind that would mean a little tacking to reach the cod grounds, is sufficient to keep every boat in. It never happens that, one boat goes without all. They work on principle, not on personal feelings.

For two nights I lay awake waiting for the call of the fishermen with whom I had arranged to spend the day at the fishing-grounds. At Amherst the boats were accustomed to leave at one o’clock in the morning, and as a little thunder happened to come at midnight not a boat, would leave that day. The next night I waited again, wondering what would be the excuse that time. At 2 a.m. I dressed and appeared at the beach, only to find that the boats had left at midnight. The fisherman explained later that he had not called me because he did not think I would like to get up so early. I learned from one who was not a fisherman that it was the climb up the hill to the house where I stayed that had frightened the man.

None of the fishermen learn to swim. When asked what they did if they upset or were blown into the breakers, they looked at me with surprise that I should ask.

“Sink,” answered the one who could speak English most fluently, after a moment’s thought.

I lost my anxiety to accompany them fishing. I could imagine them sinking in preference to striking out.

When the day is bad they hang around the stores and cod-flakes hurling their ancient French at one another in paragraphs, and apparently missing none of it. Some of them will spend the day on their boats, cleaning up, at their little farms if the women cannot finish the work, or with their tiny French ponies and home-made carts, digging clams for bait along the shore.

At Grindstone only lobster fishing is carried on, the fishing-grounds being too far distant to be reached each day. During the months of July and August the men can be seen leisurely making repairs to their houses in preparation for the winter winds, or cul­tivating the small gardens they possess. With the desire for companionship and for making the work light, they work in gangs, much after the fashion of “bees” in Ontario rural districts. But there is little resemblance to the proverbial bee in their actions. On the roof of a small verendah I counted eight able-bodied men shingling. Not one had to move except upwards as he finished his share of the row.

And while the fishermen smoke and lean on the cod-flakes thousands of tons of hay go to waste all over the Islands. A couple of dollars as a bribe to catch a few lobsters out of season for private use brought three of the crabs; it was lonesome out drawing in the traps alone. It was unfortunate that the swimming beach was across a small bay, for it was impossible to tempt an idle fisherman to row his dory except for fish. When one comes to think of it, of what use is money to people who know nothing of modern luxuries and who could not be bought to leave the Islands?

It is fortunate that with this idea of business they are not called upon to compete with the outside world. When I handed a husky fisherman a quarter for carrying my trunk from the wharf he looked dubiously at it with his hand in his pocket wondering what change he should give. On leaving the Island I repeated the operation and he was still more bewildered. He thought that I had engaged him for the trip. Incidentally he had shouldered the trunk and dropped down to the wharf, negotiating a cliff that I could scarcely manage with my hands free.

Except among the English, there are few adults with sufficient education to read or write; and those who can are duly respected. The clergy con­sists of four priests and one Anglican clergyman. In the course of his duties the latter is forced to drive thirty-five miles one Sunday and sail fifteen the next. For eighteen years Father Blaquiere, the head of the priests, has lived among these people; how many more he will labour is determined only by his days on earth. For ten years he has been building a church to seat 1,400, and is just this year able to look forward to the expenditure of the $4,000 that is necessary to pur­chase the seats. The Father is a factor in the life of the Islands, a pastor of his people, a friend of every­body and wrapped up in his church and the peculiar demands of the fisher-folk.

A sick man has to send to Grindstone or House Harbour, central points on the Islands, but fifteen to twenty miles distant by water from the east and west ends. The duties of the two doctors are strenuous, darting here and there among the Islands in sail or motor boats (of which latter there are six), driving over the long sand wastes, and attempting to attend to the wants of eight thousand people. In appearance but fishermen themselves, their work would scarcely pass muster in Toronto.

The other lucky possessor of education is made the General Official of the Island on which he lives. At one Island an escaped French soldier, with a nervous reticence about himself that would convict him in any court, is clerk of the court, magistrate, registrar, notary public, post-master. That was all there was to give him. The Grindstone scholar is most of these things with the addition of inspector of the public schools and agent for the boat.

Law is an outside force for which there is no demand or liking on the Islands. Up to recent years the Magdaleners existed without a representative of the Provincial authorities, without court or jail. They got the jail but few prisoners. During my visit, one prisoner, a young fellow who had stolen some money-order forms from the post-office, was the lonesome prisoner. Tried by the magistrate, who was also the post-master, he was sentenced to the unique position he occupied.

I was privileged to attend the annual court—at least to witness the opening and closing ceremonies, for there were no cases. There had been two in sight, but the awful majesty of the ordeal had induced each to yield what the other would not. A Government boat came all the way from Gaspe with the judge, a senator on a jaunt, his brother, a city magistrate, and two lawyers, one the son of the judge. A wire told of the com­ing of another lawyer from Pictou on that day’s boat, to take cases undefended. The sheriff read a paper in French, the judge said something in the same language, the senator leaned over and told me something else, and the boat was ready to return on its thirty-six-hour trip. There are breaches of the law among the Islanders—it is not possible that so many people could live without offence—but they are much more lenient with delinquents than where the police court is a convenient club.

An old fisherman was complaining that his trolls were gone. A sympathetic listener inquired how they had been lost, and could he remember where.

“How?” the old fellow repeated with some show of spirit. Then he quieted down. “Well, there was a lobster fisherman around there, and when he left the trolls left too.”

Rare as is the tourist, two boarding-houses provide accommodation for the commercial or sight-seeing traveller—one at Grindstone and the other at Amherst. The four elderly spinsters at Amherst, who have built a large house on the point called after their father—Shea’s Point—are continuing the welcome for the traveller that was furnished by their mother to the writer of two articles in the twenty-five-year-old magazine discovered in the Toronto reference library. The quaintly old-fashioned interior, with beautiful hooked rugs, hand­made doilies, tidies and cushion covers, is a bit of life that passed away many years ago elsewhere in Canada. On the ornate organ rest the beloved favourites of twenty years ago and yet strangely new for the surroundings—“After the Ball,” “Break the News to Mother,” “Maiden’s Prayer,” and “Sweet Marie.” For the last thirty years the grateful visitor has been pleased to leave behind him a record of his visit in an old album. The cheery “nice fine evening” of the four sisters is one of the clinging memories of the Islands—an echo of their wish for all their guests.

The hygienic bovine that has been trained in all the latest improvements on nature’s crudeness is unknown amid the rank, long grass that covers the Islands. Some of us remember similar milk and cream, but it is only a memory. Add to this 100 per cent. cream a diet of buttermilk, fish, lobsters, eggs, cake at all meats, chicken, canned and fresh pickles of unknown variety, and there is no reason for the most affected tourist to plead plaintively, “Not what I’m used to at home, you know.”

The winter life is still a mystery to me. Asked how they fill in the long five months when their world is bounded by the wild waves of the Gulf, the Islander is too surprised to paint the picture so that another can understand. The younger generation has introduced the graphophone, and it was rather startling after a long walk in the primitive quaintness of the outside life to hear one night the strains of “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?”, followed immediately by “The Cubanola Glide.” The Grindstone boarding-house could boast of two hundred records, but then one of the girls had been to school in Halifax.

But what was far more interesting to me as showing the real winter life of those who had maintained the old-time simplicity on the Islands, were the closely-hooked rugs, more than an inch thick and destined to last a century unless the modem buffalo moth be introduced, the framed pictures, both frame and picture made from tiny, many-coloured sea shells, and the old-fashioned tidies that adorned the backs of chairs. And I could picture the old people sitting by the fire-place knitting and hooking rugs, while the younger generation, already reaching out for a different life, danced to the graphophone or slid down the many snow-covered hills until weariness rather than the clock set the time to stop. For while the fierce winds of the winter blow from shore to shore unobstructed by forests there is nothing to demand consideration of day or night—nothing but the filling in of the time until the ice breaks up again for the next fishing season.

The Magdalen Islands, Part 1

The Magdalen Islands, Part 1

By W. Lacey Amy

Illustrated with photographs by the author.

From The Canadian Magazine, Feb. 1911. Digitized by Doug Frizzle, Dec. 2015.

 

Year by year in Canada it is becoming more difficult to find a spot with the fascination of the “new.” The advent of the tourist, Canadian and foreign, as such an important factor, has covered the country with a people who, while ever anxious to discover nature at its origin, are not content to leave it so.

But there is still one accessible spot, far removed from the dust of the automobile, the studied négligé of the summer tourist and the commercialism of the tourist-spoiled servant—a place where the people, the life, as well as the scenery are yet unspoiled. As such it is not advertised with pictured folder and enticing description. It has had no recommendations of pleased patrons; but it has provided for the privileged few who have visited it the rest from turmoil and rush that makes it almost vandalism to assist in introducing it to the average traveller.

It was by mere chance that a talk with Kellogg, “the bird man,” several years ago, and the casual remarks of the Intercolonial folder aroused the wish to spend my holidays in the Magdalen Islands. And further attempts to learn more of these out-of-the-way Islands but added to the attraction. An exhaustive search in the Toronto reference library revealed but three articles on the Islands, two of them in United States magazines more than twenty-five years old, and the other written by one who had not left the steamer that makes the semiweekly trips between the mainland and the Islands.

Correspondence with the owner of the steamer brought nothing but the names of a number of possible houses at which board might be secured, and inquiries addressed direct to these houses added information of varying importance. One woman was unable to take boarders because “my husband has been drowning since—.”

Another answered the requests for information by saying that her rates were “six dollars a week. When are you coming?” A man in a little French village, where, I discovered afterwards, only two or three could speak English, assured me that: “The rate of board is generally five dollars a week and fifteen dollars a month, this is what tourist give, but will say, what, being you are from, we may reduce it some.” And this delightful unconventionality continued to the last moment of my stay on the Islands.

In many ways it is difficult to discover why this group of Islands is neglected by the tourist. Easy of access they are, and the transportation comforts are surprising. The Intercolonial carries one to Pictou, Nova Scotia, in the unsurpassed accommodation it affords. From Pictou a staunch little 650-ton. 165-foot steamboat runs twice a week to the Islands, just making both ends meet by means of a $15,000 subsidy from the Government. From the obliging Captain Burns to the single waiter the service is surprisingly good.

On the Islands themselves the visitor experiences all that quaintness of people and life that is the result of long generations away from the toil and competition of the outside world. Seven thousand French and a thousand English, the former the descendants of old French-Acadians exiled from the Annapolis Valley in the time of history, and the latter offspring of the immigrants brought by the English Admiral who owned the Islands for so many years, thickly cover the group. These families have grown up together for generations, or have lived side by side in different sections of the same island, working at the same business in the same indifferent, satisfied way.

Perhaps not one out of a hundred of the present population has ever been on the mainland. The fishing grounds are the limits of their wanderings. Even those who have taken the steamer over to Pictou know only that town, or perhaps Halifax, where the store supplies come from, and Quebec, the seat of Government, hundreds of miles away.

The location of the Magdalen Islands may have been more or less familiar to us when the name came in the list of Canadian Islands, but geography does not keep fresh unless business or public affairs revive it periodically. And assuredly the Magdalens would provide no reason for remembrance, except to those who visit them.

Away out in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence they lie, a series of mountain tops that managed to get above the water. And, without a break in their fury, the wild waves of the Gulf sweep down for two hundred miles from the cold shores of Labrador. Eastward a hundred miles stands the bleak western coast of Newfoundland. Cape Breton is seventy miles to the south, and Prince Edward Island noses out into the Gulf the same distance westward. From Pictou, the mainland port, to Amherst, the nearest port of the Islands, is 127 miles.

At high tide there are thirteen islands, but when the slow-moving ebb is completed, with three feet of water lost, seven islands are joined by a low strip of land, making a continuous stretch of fifty-three miles. Over this sand road, treacherous with its quick-sands and dangerous to any but the resident, it is possible to drive from Amherst Island at the southwest, over Grindstone, Wolf, and Grosse to Coffin in the northeast. The disconnected islands are Deadman, on the west, Entry and Alright, on the southeast, and Bryon and Bird Rock, far away to the northeast.

Deadman Island is but a long peak of rock with but sufficient shore to allow the erection of a few rough shacks for the sealers in the spring. Entry is peopled exclusively with English, has no port, and is worthy of notice only for having the highest peak in the group, 530 feet high. Alright is divided from Grindstone by a mere channel over which a rope ferry makes the transfers. The convent is situated here. Bryon Island is a small fishing island eight miles north of the main group, where but a few families remain in the winter.

Most interesting of the smaller islands is Bird Rock, a tiny peak of six acres, 125 feet above the water, accessible only by means of windlass and bucket. On its top the birds flock in white clouds, and the only human beings are the light-house keeper, his wife and two assistants. All year round they are forced to remain, since the ice of early spring and late fall prevent access to the rock, and in none but the quietest weather and water can a boat approach. Twice a year the supply boat carries provisions, but for the rest of year the lonely family is cut off from the outside world.

All that is geography; but there is most interesting history to make the Magdalens worthy of more attention than they receive. It need but be touched here. Cartier himself made the first visit to the rocky, inhospitable shores in 1534, but it was not until 1663 that the first settlement was established by Honfleur fishermen. A Frenchman placed them there, and, sailing away to France, returned in the spring to find that a Cape Breton official had sent a colony over and the two groups had combined and sailed away to Gaspe. The Frenchman tried again and was more successful. His son attached the name “Madeleine Islands” to the group, using his mother’s name; and, although this was gradually changed officially to Magdalen, most of the people still call it “Madalens.”

In the course of time Admiral Coffin acquired the Islands for services rendered, and to his descendants they belonged until three years ago, when they were sold (or at least what remained to sell) to the Magdalen Island Development Company, a group of Montreal men who are even more anxious to dispose of their rights than was the English family.

Now the only remnants of the M. I. D., as the company is called, is a group of large, deserted buildings, into which $200,000 was sunk to develop fishing in cod, mackerel and lobster, sealing or anything else in which there might be money. Now but one man remains on the Islands for the company; he is anxiously looking for a purchaser or a re-organisation scheme.

Each island is but a peak of soft sandstone into which the wild waves are gradually eating their way. Small, vari-shaped mounds rise from the water along the shores in all directions, the remains of what were at one time stretches of solid land. Every storm claims its piece, and in time the serious inroads of the water will leave the Islands but a memory.

On Entry Island the former lighthouse was engulfed by the steady wearing away of the rock at its foundation. The present beacon is a quarter-mile inland from the sheer cliff over which it sends its light to add to the other dozens of light-houses that make navigation possible amongst the dangerous shoals and islands.

My first sight of the Islands was in the early morning as we cast anchor off Etang du Nord, a small French village on the west coast of Grindstone Island. Just back of us loomed the forbidding rock of Deadman, its cold whiteness standing out mysteriously against the lighting sky of the morning. Over the peak of grindstone the sun was just showing, scattering little rays through the clouds on the rippling water. In under the shore the fishing fleet was stringing out for a mile—a hundred of them—on its way to the fishing grounds. The black sails, prepared with a tamarack solution, made them like phantom ships in their strangeness.

From the shore a dozen herring-boats were paddling leisurely out to us, or moving along under small sails. The fishermen were coming with their boxes of fish and would unload the salt, which is the principal freight. Lazily they came, and my first impressions of them were fully justified by further experience. From both sides of the boat they unloaded, handling their awkward craft in the ocean swells with careless ease.

The passengers for this stop were unloaded with some difficulty into one of the boats, and, with the mail, they set out for the shore. The mail would be taken by a driver four miles across to Grindstone, then fifteen miles to the top of the Islands and return to Grindstone by the time the boat made the trip of forty miles around Amherst Island to Grindstone in the afternoon.

After four hours unloading, the fishermen going back and forward to the shore as if the boat had the whole day ahead of it, we got away for Amherst. At Cabin Cove, a small group of houses snuggled under the highest peak on Amherst Island, another stop was made for the fishermen to unload salt.

Rounding between Entry Island and the long Sandy Hook of Amherst harbour, which extends but a couple of feet above the water for three miles, we approached the first wharf on the Islands. There are but three of these, and the unprotected harbours expose them to the waves to the dangerous sinking of the ends. At the other calling-places the weather is the deciding factor, weeks elapsing before some of the stops can be made.

There is but one protected harbour among the Islands, Grand Entry, and the entrance to it is so shallow that it can be made by the steamboat only in calm weather and at high tide. In a storm the bottom of the entrance shows up through the waves, and a visit is impossible. Pleasant Bay is a nice-sounding title for the large body of water enclosed in the instep of the long boot that is the general shape of the group, but a wind from the east makes it more dangerous than the open.

It is in these storms that rage so frequently around the Islands that lies one of the reasons for the limited number of those who make the trip out. Within two hundred yards of the house where I stopped for a week were the wrecks of four large schooners driven on the shore last year. A quarter of a mile out in Pleasant Bay the spars of another protruded from the water, the result of the shifting of a load of loose herring purchased for bait. One day during my visit the fishermen brought in on their little charettes cod thrown overboard from the wreck of a 100-foot schooner that was being lightered by the owner in the hope of saving the hull.

Just a mile away the Lunenburg, the predecessor of the present steamship, ran ashore in a snowstorm of late 1905. Only five of the sixteen on board were saved. And all along the shores as we steamed could be seen the hulks of former wrecks, not many seasons old, for the drifting sands quickly cover them up.

Light-houses adorn every point as the limit of precaution, but the shoals and reefs, the hundreds of projecting bars and points, the shifting winds and fierce waves of this district prove too much for the most experienced of mariners. Pleasant Bay has been the scene of one of the most disastrous calamities of fishing experience. The Lord’s Day gale of 1873 caught in this deceptive harbour hundreds of fishing schooners fleeing from the wind outside. The sudden shifting of the gale caught them in the trap, and the shore was strewn with the hulls of boats and the bodies of fishermen. Within sight of the boarding-house mentioned a stretch of four hundred yards of beach was covered with forty-five schooners.

So many old hulls lie under the water and on the sands that the fishermen claim the clams of Amherst harbour are unfit for use because of the rusty poison they have drawn from the metal. Whether this is the reason or not, the fact remains that the clams caught on the shore are poisonous and of a rusty colour, fit only for bait.

There is little that is attractive in the distant appearance of the Islands. At one time covered with large trees, the inhabitants cut so recklessly for shipbuilding and firewood that entire islands are without so much as a shrub. Grindstone Island is the prettiest, because of tracts of short spruce and fir, unfit for use, but taking away the bald look that makes Amherst Island, for instance, appear so bleak.

Approaching the landing-place it is a pretty sight to see the white-washed houses stretched out irregularly over the land. There are no villages, as we understand them, the houses being placed without regard to the location of the stores or post-offices. In fact, there is little of the Islands that is not peopled. The population is much too numerous, and it can only be a year or two until migration must take place to make room. The tiny farms that occupy the fishermen between fishing seasons are not large or productive enough to support the rapidly-increasing population.

The houses are whitewashed, and with few exceptions shingled all over. The roofs are treated with a coat of whitewash or tar, not only to preserve them, but to assist in keeping out the bleak winds that roar over the Gulf in the long winter. Inside, many of the houses are papered over cloth which blows and waves in the winds outside.

When the winter comes the Islanders are cut off from the outside world save for the cable which connects the north-east point with Cape Breton. (During the past fall a wireless connection has been established). For five months no boat can weather the ice-floes and storms of this section of the Gulf. The Magdaleners must provide their own amusement, with only such information of the outside as comes over the wire to the little telegraph stations that are used only in emergency. The boat runs as long as the ice will allow, usually being forced to stop before the first of December. In April it sometimes starts again, but May more commonly sees the break in the long isolation.

There are sixteen telegraph offices under the direction of M Le Bourdais, a French sailor wrecked thirty-nine years ago, in winter, on the north shore, his legs cut off above the knees owing to the exposure. He was obliged to take this means of earning a living. And the number of messages does not overwork him. One office had not sent or received a message for fifteen months, but the operator received $150 for his share of the idleness. Another operator was paid $100 for one message.

Two years ago the wire broke in December. It was impossible to mend it at that time of year, and the isolation after years of cable connection which was seldom used worried the islanders. At last one of them rigged up a molasses cask with a tin sail and set it adrift, with letters sealed in lobster tins. Ten days later it was picked up at Post Hastings, Cape Breton, and the letters were delivered. From the first of December to the first of May that was the only connection the Islands had with the mainland. Then the government ice-breaker smashed its way through the unusually late ice-floes and brought relief.

And what of the simple, quaint fisher folk who inhabit these Islands, who fish for cod and lobster and receive little for their labour? Their life, their happiness and innocence, their limited wants, their toils and sports are worthy of separate attention. Living in all the dangers of ice and storm and wind, content with little and not working hard for it, their life is the relief from strain and struggle that would send a business man back to his work with renewed energies and revived strength, with a mind that has been unable to do anything but rest. A quaint, old-fashioned people, I found them, as yet unspoiled by the outside world, uncommercial, unambitious, and ignorant of life as others know it, but unique in their simplicity, friendliness and habits.

This is the first of two articles by Mr. Amy on this interesting part of the Dominion. The second will appear in the March Number.