Liquor and the War

IV.—Liquor and The War

By Lacey Amy

From the column, England in Arms in The Canadian Magazine, August 1917. Digitized by Doug Frizzle, January 2016.

 

PREJUDICE, in a study of the drink question in England is disastrous to conclusions that are either sound or safe in this time of war. The temperance “crank” is faced at the start by a great problem of expedi­ency which concerns the co-operation of the very public he presumes him­self to be considering. It is not mere­ly a question of “reforming” a people against their will but of avoiding their antagonism at a time when even public carelessness and lack of active sympathy may be more disastrous to the Empire than the worst imaginable effects of the present extent of drink­ing alcoholic beverages in England. On the other hand, the noisy suppor­ter of “liberty” has against him a volume of figures and unassailable re­cords of the effects of liquor on the heart of the Empire that takes the ground from under his feet.

So tremendous is the problem, so ex­tensive its side issues, that no maga­zine article can attempt more than a mere cursory consideration. Especially is this so in any presentation of the facts to Canadian readers, who have first of all to understand conditions in England before even reaching the general question of prohibition or abo­lition.

A concise review of the complica­tions that overthrew instantly the stock arguments of both sides may be the best preparation for a calm con­sideration of the existing legislation touching on the consumption and manufacture of liquor. At this mo­ment the immediate problem in Eng­land is the supply of food necessary to sustenance and strength, to which is added the corollary of the demand for man-power. Apart from the world’s shortage, which would presuppose in countries the recognition of the wis­dom of applying all food stuffs to their most complete uses, victory to the Empire depends upon the main­tenance of the United Kingdom’s share for the United Kingdom’s peo­ple and armies. And that maintenance is almost entirely a matter of ocean tonnage, since eighty per cent, of the food of the United Kingdom is im­ported. The Government can reason­ably depend upon a certain propor­tion only of the tonnage space of ocean vessels reaching English ports; and since the available tonnage is al­ready insufficient it is most important that every inch of it should be of the greatest concentrated food value. It is for that purpose that the importa­tion of luxuries has been prohibited, that our newspapers are reduced to the minimum size, that even complete foods like nuts and fruit have either been cut from the lists or limited.

Under this heading I quote figures that have been used in the public press and presented officially in the House without contradiction, so that their reliability is unchallenged, especially when the press and the House are against abolition. The beer produc­tion of the United Kingdom in 1914 was 36,000,000 barrels, with almost an equal amount of spirits—one and three-fifths barrels for every man, woman and child. In 1915 it fell to 34,500,000 barrels of beer alone, with the spirits almost the same, and dur­ing 1916 the beer was reduced another million. The materials used in 1914 (barley, hops, sugar, etc.), amounted to 2,100,000 tons for distilling and brewing, the former being one quarter of the whole. For the transportation of this material there would he re­quired almost 1,200,000 net register tons of shipping (2,700,000 measure­ment tons), more than the capacity of ten boats of 5,000 tons size a week, or one hundred and ten boats continu­ously making five voyages a year—more boats than the Germans were able to sink during the first two months of submarine ruthlessness.

Taking last year, 1916, as an inter­esting example of the martial years: During that year there were a million and a quarter tons of barley turned into liquor, 305,176 tons of other grains, 67,578 tons of rice, maize and similar preparations, 134,000 tons of sugar, and 41,115 tons of molasses. All that in the third year of the war. What this vast quantity of food ma­terials since the beginning of the war means in human sustenance is best explained by the estimate that it would make two billion two-pound loaves of bread and the sugar would support the entire army. And the ships required to transport it would have a total tonnage in the same period greater than the entire sinkings by the enemy up to the middle of 1917. At the end of 1916 there were still 1,800,000 tons of shipping in such employment.

Selecting sugar as the commodity of greatest stringency thus affected, the brewers have faced therein their strongest opposition, since the greater part of England has been on short sugar rations since early in 1916.

But there is other wastage attribut­ed to the manufacture of liquor in wartime. The expenditure by the United Kingdom in liquor during the war is estimated at more than two bil­lion dollars, or sufficient to provide all the expenses of war for more than two months of the most expensive period. More than 30,000 acres were devoted last year to the growing of hops. Sev­enty-five hundred trains were requir­ed to haul the materials (and the train shortage is one of the problems of the war), and four million tons of coal were used in the breweries; and the Navy, the munition works, the dock­yards, the Allies, and the people have suffered seriously during the winter from lack of coal. For the mining of this coal more than a whole brigade of able-bodied men are required; and the man-power represented in the brew­eries, the addition trains, the porter­age, has never been estimated save in the form of being the equivalent of the entire nation standing idle a month and a half every year.

The drinking habits of the English affect the progress of the war in other ways. What is called absenteeism is the habit of the average workingman to holiday on days not legally granted him. The English working year is, to the Canadian, a bewildering series of customary and legal holidays. New Year’s lasts for ten days in some sections in peace times, Christ­mas from three to five days, Easter from Thursday to Tuesday, Whit­sun in some places a week, but always three days, and so on through a list unknown in number and scope to American experience. Great manufacturing firms stop work in mid-summer to enable their em­ployees to spend a week of mirth and relaxation at Blackpool. And each legal holiday is rounded off by another one or two in recovery from the effects of the gaiety in which the working­man’s holiday-making leads him to in­dulge. No fewer than five million hours were lost by absenteeism in one war year by Clyde firms, the average in one firm employing 1,500 hands be­ing nine hours each man every week. Indeed, it was before the war custom­ary in many localities and occupations to consider work accomplished on Mondays as so much to the good, and large manufacturers tell me even to­day that their average working week is four days. For this liquor was either responsible or a contributory cause. The condition was generally recognized and accepted as unavoid­able—so much so that the improve­ment since the war began is taken as a matter for pride. Early in the war the figures concerning absenteeism were made public, but so startling and unendurable were they to English pride that Lloyd George almost sacri­ficed his political future in the public use of them. They constituted a fact that could not be contradicted, the ef­fect of which on the vital industry of war-waking dare not be permitted to continue.

There is the other side, of course, but it will not be so readily under­stood in Canada as it is in England. The main contention of the brewers— supported by many influential news­papers and writers—is forced to con­centrate on something more weighty than liberty of action. Wartime is in­dependent of such arguments; liberty counts only when it does not threaten the State. It will come as a surprise to Canadians to know that the defence for the manufacture of beer is that it is necessary. It is seriously contended that hard workers must have their beer. Large advertisements repeat it ominously. Letters to the daily press insist on it. The soldier is wont to pre­sent his experience as clinching the argument. The working people are unable to contemplate abstention any more than the English man or woman of a different class would submit to prohibition of afternoon tea, which is considered as essential a meal as breakfast. It is a question of how far a national habit becomes a necessity. The very seriousness of the claim en­titles it to more consideration than people accustomed to other ways might be inclined to give it.

The debate between the two parties to the question reached its keenest in­terest towards the end of 1916 when legislation was obviously necessary in view of the food and man-power needs. Availing themselves of the remark­able power of the English press, both bought space plentifully and present­ed their arguments for human diges­tion. On the one side was ranged a body of men among whom were many of England’s greatest. The Strength of Britain Movement they called themselves. The composition of the organization added to its strength, for it was not made up of temperance fa­natics or no prohibition advocates, but of men who normally took their glass but claimed to see in the exigencies of war sufficient grounds for prohibiting the manufacture of beer and spirits. On the other side were those to whom the liquor traffic meant wealth or a living. Even the brewers submitted to curtailment of production without serious opposition.

One day the Movement would give figures and draw deductions. The next day the opponents would criticize fig­ures and deductions. It was fair for­ensic pleading until the anti-prohibi­tionists resorted to an unfortunate form of deception. A page of mild tolerance or frank support of beer drinking would be arranged in the same form and make-up as the Move­ment advertisements, and would be concluded with the words “it is part of the Strength of Britain”, the last three words in a line by themselves in the same type as the same words in the Movement’s advertisement. To the casual reader it seemed like conces­sions from the Movement. But the scheme was too un-English to be pro­fitable in England.

The anti-prohibitionists claimed that the sugar for beer was entirely unfit for public consumption. The other side countered by reproducing an order from the Port of London au­thorities forbidding a large London caterer to remove from the docks a shipment of sugar consigned to him, because it was needed by the brewers. The yeast by-product of the beer was necessary, said the brewers. Look at Canada and Russia, replied the Move­ment. The trade was necessary, local­ly and for export. The answer was that its prohibition was necessary for the winning of the war, according to the Prime Minister. It was pointed out that from every ton of barley used for beer there was a large quantity of excellent cattle food upon which the milk of the nation depended. The statement was met by the counter one that the offals fed to cattle was infi­nitely less valuable than the whole barley. The demands of the army were emphasized, and on that the Move­ment was silent. The place of alcohol in munition making had to be admit­ted. The revenue from beer taxation was made much of, and was faced by the million and a half dollars a day paid by the public as its drink bill over and above the tax receipts by the Government. The brewers contended that tea and coffee occupied more space in the tonnage than the materi­als for beer; and that, too, the Move­ment ignored.

Two incidents embarrassing to the advocates of continued production oc­curred in the House, and England’s sense of humour was tickled. The brew­ers had rashly contended that a given quantity of barley and sugar, etc., produced more than their weight in beer, a food product. Intended only for the consumption of the unthink­ing, it was brought up in the House. The Secretary concerned tartly asked where the extra food value came from. When the brewers ran a series of ad­vertisements contending for beer as of real food value, the Secretary agreed with a questioner that if that were so then the imbiber should elim­inate other food in order to come with­in the rationing orders of the Food Controller. That argument died sud­denly.

It was a merry fight while it lasted, and the arguments were a mirror of the peculiar conditions existing in England. The odds were unquestion­ably with the prohibitionists, but. only because of the war. Under peace Eng­land would not have concerned itself to read or listen. But barley is food, and food is a big factor in the Eng­lishman’s life, in bulk and frequency. The movement against liquor was strengthened by several factors of sen­timental effect. The King’s abstin­ence for the duration of the war spread to thousands of wealthy and middle-class homes. Insisting purely as a matter of expediency in which the way had been shown by a beloved Sovereign, the strongest advocates of abolition were those who were known to have no tendency that way under normal conditions.

Lloyd George’s well-known princi­ples and opinions have produced an interesting experience. As has been mentioned before, his over-frank ad­vocacy of prohibition in the early stages of the war almost cost him his highest place in English history. The public outcry at that time against his bluntness in supporting his opinions was so loud that the most fearless man in English public life was silenced. For two years he uttered not another word on the subject, and when he be­came Prime Minister he for several months permitted himself merely to hint at his feelings, confining expres­sion to a connection between the ma­terial consumed in liquor and the sub­marine menace. Indeed, as Prime Minister, with an eagle-eyed opposi­tion studying his every move to dis­countenance him, he realized the wis­dom of leaving prohibition statements to his subordinates.

In this public outcry is that which brings to a thoughtful halt those who would, without pause, close the saloon doors and dismantle the breweries. As an initial caution to walk warily is the backing the manufacture of liquor has long had in England. When a great church draws a large part of its revenue from the traffic, when a consider­able portion of the wealth of England is locked up in it, there is cause for consideration whether the ammunition is sufficient at the moment for making the attack. There is in England no sentiment against the brewer, the pub­lican, the drinker. Rather, the non­drinker is an object of ridicule. Among the most influential men in England are the brewers, and the publican is a citizen of rank ex-officio. Bishops not only have money invested in breweries but preside over Associa­tions that own public houses. The bar is not a place for a man to sidle into, and for women to avoid. Men and women enter one of the three or four entrances that feature the English saloon as a Canadian would enter a store to make a purchase. Since the selling hours were limited there is al­ways a line-up at the doors before the time of opening. Young men take their girl friends in as to a Canadian ice-cream parlour, and women and men spend the evening therein as the great club of the common people. Before the doors, especially on Sundays, stand baby carriages and wee children awaiting the re-appearance of mother. In England and Wales there are 90,000 public houses.

The greatest surprise in England to the average Canadian is the unlimited patronage of the bars.

The result of this licence is a men­tal attitude that forms an essential feature in any fight for prohibition even in war time. In peace the pro­hibitionist has a hopeless vision.

Where the question of expediency enters is that, however convinced the ardent prohibitionist may be that the elimination of liquor would hasten the end of the war, he has first to con­sider whether the people would be with him. Failing their support there is the uncertainty of the effect of pro­hibitive measures. A nation convinced that it is doing no wrong is not going to see its pleasures cut off without dangerous protest. And the English workingman has a habit of expressing his displeasure in effective form. There is not the slightest doubt that thousands would prefer even to lose the war rather than to lose their beer; and the Government that attempted to introduce prohibition at this time would stare into a list of other conser­vation measures that might be enforc­ed with the consent of the people, without attacking the workingman’s entertainment. It is also feared by some prohibitionists that any attempt to enforce prohibition would meet with such opposition that the revolt would mean retrogression in any hon­est movement later towards that con­summation.

The general attitude of the people is not uncertain. A vote to-day would overwhelmingly defeat suggested in­terference. Whether there would be open revolt or repudiation of loyal sentiments no one is in a position to say with complete authority. Judging from the munition strikes now on, the experiment would be dangerous. What is desirable in effect is not always what is possible or wisest at the moment.

It is considerations such as these which have handicapped the Govern­ments of the United Kingdom since the first of the war. The wisdom or restriction was not associated in any way with decided predilection for pro­hibition. The early acts of Parliament forbidding treating and curtailing the hours of sale were intended to deal with a great waste in man-power more than in food. That they have done so to some extent is certain, but other in­fluences have cropped up that have discounted their effectiveness. The higher wage has enabled the heavy drinker to indulge himself, and the more thrifty one to open his pocket. The effect of army life, too, has been to throw liquor into the way of those who had never before fallen seriously under its influence. The drinking among women has varied in the ex­perience of different sections. In a general way the wife’s allowance has provided her with resources for drink­ing previously denied her; and the missionaries of London say that con­ditions among them are terrible. On the other hand the report of the Con­trol Board casts doubt on such an opinion. Some investigation which I have given the matter myself reveals the existence of more drinking at home, partly because of the shorter open hours, largely because there is money to purchase in greater quanti­ties for organized orgies.

The official figures are so easy to misinterpret. The convictions for drunkenness in London and forty other cities and towns in Great Brit­ain of a population exceeding 100,000 amounted in 1913 to 119,000 men and 40,000 women, in 1914 to 115,000 men and 41,000 women, in 1915 to 126,000 men and 38,000 women, and in 1916 to only 53,000 men and 24,000 women. That these figures are misleading may be gathered from the fact that the consumption of absolute alcohol de­creased between the first and the last years by only twenty per cent. Of course several million men were out of the country in 1916, and the absence of relation between the number of convictions and the amount drunk is explained by the greater latitude al­lowed the drinker. The Home Office had issued an order—which was with­drawn in January of this year—that soldiers’ wives were not to be charged for a first offence; and drunken sol­diers are very leniently dealt with, while officers are disciplined only by the military courts. It is admitted by the magistrates that there is more drinking but fewer convictions.

At the same time it is due the sol­dier to say that very few are visibly drunk on the streets of London; and unfortunately the number of Overseas men, Australian and Canadian, has been greater than their proper pro­portion. This is explained partly by the eagerness of the English to “en­tertain” the Colonial, partly by Cana­dian inexperience with English beers.

The early efforts of Lloyd George to effect prohibition having failed, and the anti-treating and short hours reg­ulations having proved ineffective, the taxation on liquor was increased. But the increased wage of the munition maker rendered that move abortive, and a Liquor Control Board was appointed. The duty of this body was to control the interference of drunk­enness with munition making, and for this purpose they had absolute power over the public houses of certain de­fined munition areas. The effects of the drastic measures it enforced were immediate. Some bars in dangerous districts were closed, the open hours of others limited, and model public houses were set up. The weekly aver­age of convictions within their terri­tories in six large cities showed a re­duction of almost sixty per cent., and students of the figures found a direct connection between the open hours and the number of convictions. In England, up to the middle of Febru­ary of this year, the Board closed eighty-five licensed premises in Great Britain. As the members of the Board are not prohibitionists there can be no criticism by the antis of their honesty in enforcing that which they consider necessary for the maintenance of the output of munitions. Sunday selling was forbidden, but mineral waters and soft drinks were permitted, the pat­ronage under such conditions proving that the bar is more of a club than a welcome opportunity for dissipation, a fact emphasized by the Board in its report.

In August, 1916, the output of the brewers was restricted to 85 per cent. of the quantity produced during the previous year. On December 27th, a Defence of the Realm regulation per­mitted the naval or military authori­ties, or the Ministry of Munitions, to close altogether or curtail the hours of licensed premises. That this power was confined to an unproductive impo­tence is shown by the demand of the authorities at Aldershot, the great military camp, to close fifty per cent. of the surrounding public houses. The Licence Commissioners first consulted the brewers and then refused.

On January 3rd, 1917, when food shortage loomed in the near distance, it was promulgated that spirits should be reduced to thirty degrees under proof, the regulation not to apply to liquors bottled before June 6th, 1916. It was throughout this period, when further restrictions were certain, that was waged the newspaper advertise­ment debate, the Government standing—as it does in England during news­paper discussions—to see how the public stood before taking action.

On January 24th, the Food Control­ler, head of the new department called the Ministry of Food, founded but not peopled in the time of Asquith, an­nounced that after a careful investiga­tion of the resources available for food for the people he had come to the con­clusion that the materials used in the manufacture of beer must be curtailed. After April 1st the output was to be further reduced to 70 per cent. of the output for the previous year. Thus the brewers had two full months to increase their output so that their licence for the coming year might be as liberal as possible. A correspond­ing restriction was applied to the re­lease of wines and spirits from bond.

The effect of this legislation was that an output of 36,000,000 barrels before the war was reduced in two stages to 18,200,000. It would mean a reduction in the use of barley of 286,000 tons, 36,000 tons of sugar, and 16,500 tons of grits. Lord Devonport also pointed out that it would set free for the use of agriculturists a greater percentage of offals than was previ­ously produced from brewers’ grains. Whereas the brewers returned 25 per cent. of the barley as offals, the farmer would now have 40 per cent, after the other 60 had been made into flour.

Three weeks later it was decreed that no new contracts must be made for the delivery of malt to brewers nor must brewers make it for themselves. At this time it was shown that prac­tically no spirits were being distilled except for explosives. The query as to why the 140,000,000 gallons then in stock was not drawn upon instead of using new materials was replied to in the House by the official statement that it would not pay, although that step would be taken if found neces­sary. Ten days later the manufacture of malt was entirely forbidden except with the consent of the Food Control­ler.

During these few weeks there had been much public discussion of the waste of food stuffs in the manufac­ture of beer, and the submarine men­ace was opening the eyes of the people to the seriousness of the shortage. The Government took notice of pop­ular feeling by revising the regulation issued only a month before, to come into effect in another month. The out­put of beer was cut down to 10,000,­000 barrels, thus saving 600,000 tons of food stuffs. Towards the end of March, the sinkings of merchant ves­sels having become alarming, the vari­ous restrictions seemed justified. Some attempt was made, both in England and France, to exempt French wines from the limitations, but the condi­tions did not admit of argument even on behalf of allied nations.

As the law now stands there are 367,000 tons of barley, 21,420 tons of grits, and 44,700 tons of sugar being utilized for the manufacture of beer. Whether it is possible to convince the public that much of that vast quan­tity of food can he better directed de­pends to a great extent on the future record of submarine sinkings. The demand for further reduction, and even for prohibition, is undoubtedly louder, although as yet not one of the powerful London papers has advocat­ed the latter. It is a peculiarity of the standing of the English press that no such startling change could be effected without newspaper support.

For many months there has been a strong agitation for State purchase as the only feasible method of controlling the waste of food and the menace of drunkenness at such a time. The brewers resist it, probably because they know the temper of the Prime Minister, but they have lent them­selves, with almost every other influ­ence, to past restrictions and do not seriously oppose further steps in that direction. The most stubborn sup­porter of beer as a national stimulant is silenced by the Food Controller’s statement that even the malt at pres­ent in stock would, if diverted to the manufacture of bread, supply the en­tire civilian population of Great Britain with the approved ration for eleven days.

State purchase has the official ear. It has the only public support of real weight. The fact that it was consider­ed in 1915 and discarded as too heavy a financial burden has little effect on thought of to-day. That something must be done, and that pro­hibition would entail a risk the coun­try does not wish to assume in mid­war, seems to point to State purchase as the solution. And with it would go local option. Probably before this is read England will be expressing itself by local balloting upon a question which the greater part of Canada and the United States has already settled to its satisfaction.

The next article of this series is entitled “Education and the War.”

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.

Quidi Vidi

Quidi Vidi

Newfoundland’s Show Fishing Village

By W. Lacey Amy

Illustrations from Photographs by the Author

From The Canadian Magazine, Vol. XXXVIII, Toronto, January, 1912, No. 3. Digitized by Doug Frizzle, January 2016.

THE first one to sound the praises of Quidi Vidi (pronounced Kiddy Viddy; the more abrupt the better) was the first Newfoundlander I met. After it had headed the list of St. John’s attractions of every Newfoundlander I talked to during the first day of my trip across the island, I changed the wording of my inquiry and asked for things worth seeing around St. John’s—“apart from Quidi Vidi, I mean.”

But still each one persisted in commencing his list with the fishing vil­lage, until I firmly made up my mind that if there was one spot in Newfoundland that I did not want to see it was this show place that I knew would have a high iron fence around it and a sign, “Don’t point your um­brella at the picture.”

Later on I met a friend who had not learned the list by heart; and the same name headed his list. Quidi Vidi was more in the conversation than if it had been the new baby.

But I went—accidentally. I have now to acknowledge that through some strange mistake someone has put the Newfoundlander about right in the name at the head of the stereo-typed rigmarole that is learned in every country for the benefit of the innocent tourist. Who accomplished this feat is the leading mystery of St. John’s. For Quidi Vidi deserves every bit of the devotion it receives.

It is its misfortune that a visitor begins to think of Quidi Vidi like por­ridge in a Scotch home: he simply has to take it in. But once he has visited it, his resentment that it should be vulgarised by the undue familiarity of thousands who can un­derstand no more than that it is “the thing” makes him somewhat loth to add to its local celebrity.

The one who properly appreciates Quidi Vidi will seldom advertise it any more than the fisherman makes known the best fishing holes. Some day the gaze of the hurrying tourist will dispel the halo around the place; at present he has seen no more than its glow. Certainly the village should be placed behind a glass case, with a pointed railing in front; and away down the road towards St. John’s should be stationed a policeman to keep away the throng that is begin­ning to smooth the roads and paths for no other reason than that some great man, some day or other, has seen fit to describe Quidi Vidi as it is. There are few places worth writ­ing about that receive the first at­tentions of the guidebook tourist. The tiny little village that adjoins St. John’s is the most remarkable excep­tion on record.

Quidi Vidi is divided from St. John’s by about two miles of road and a cab tariff that is fearfully and wonderfully made, so far as the visi­tor is able to discover. Fortunately for my impressions, I fought shy of both on my visit. It is due to the fact that I was wandering without a guide that I came upon the fishing village before I knew it, and it had impressed itself on me before I was aware I was looking at that which I had determined carefully to avoid. The road to the village is a hard gravel, smoothly graded, city-entrance affair, just what one would expect as the route to a popular resort, as well suited to what it opens into as a starched collar to a fisherman. Cus­tom and a reckless travesty on fitness have done their most against Quidi Vidi; but the village has until now managed to confine the modernity of the road within its ditches. Singular­ly successful in its fight for exclusive­ness in the face of heavy odds, it offers little out of the ordinary to the cab-fare or the hustling motorist. To see the village one must cross the ditches.

Forced by the exigencies of Regat­ta Day patronage, I was fortunate enough not to be able to secure a cab. Perhaps therein lies the sweetness of my memory of Quidi Vidi. Up Sig­nal Hill I had struggled on foot, leav­ing the crowds streaming away to Long Pond, where the regatta races were held; and I had been rewarded by having the Hill all to myself, able to look down on the hillside city and its marvellous harbour, on the gorge that serves as an outlet for the fish­ing smack and ocean liner, without the annoyance of the “how-perfectly-splendid” tourist anxious only to see the superlative things. Far below me, as I stood beside the Tower, lay the regatta course, two miles away, but strikingly outlined by the flash­ing white and deep black of the gath­ering crowd. Along the edge of the precipitous cliffs that went straight down to the ocean I pulled myself over the rocks and pathless moss, with nothing in mind but the ocean scene beneath. Then there opened far down in front a rickety cluster of houses, with a glimpse of glistening water and cod flakes. I had no idea it was Quidi Vidi; but what I did know was that there lay something I must see more closely, and for miles I clambered down the steep rocks along the water’s edge.

Once I sank out of sight of the village and came upon the cable of­fice, a break in the desertion, a little, long, white building that concealed the conversational access to ocean-distant lands. There was no evidence that I was coming in touch with a guide-book route; the road I passed along was but a crude break in the rockiness, a byway making it easier for the foot-farer without mutilating the landscape. The village had dis­appeared over a rugged rise, but I pushed on, with the knowledge that it would break upon me without dis­appointment. Ahead of me the road branched into two forks, and, follow­ing the rougher, I came to the top of the rise, where the village came suddenly into sight, only a couple of hundred feet below me, the tall, rocky hillside rising abruptly behind it, and the ramshackle fish-houses hanging sleepily over the merest bit of glassy water.

I cared not what was the name of the village I dreaded to disturb with the prying eyes of the passer-by; at that moment I was content to stand and look. Up the grass-covered lane came a silent fisherman, toiling slowly upward as if reluctant to widen the distance to his favourite element. The rattle of a string of carriages stopped him for a moment to look away to his right beneath shaded eyes. Then he came on more quick­ly, reminded of some errand which he seemed to have forgotten when I first caught sight of him.

“Is this a village?” I asked, more as a means to conversation than for information. “Has it a name?”

“Quidi Vidi,” he answered in a voice that matched his pace, and with an abruptness of pronunciation that left me searching for the vowels.

And I lost all desire for conversa­tion. I had come where I had in­tended not to; the mountain path had hoodwinked me into a spot I had wished to avoid. But there was no chiding of the deceiver—just a won­der that at last I had come upon the one great exception, and an admira­tion for the village that was, after all, no show village, but a real centre of a real industry that had uninten­tionally fashioned itself to suit the guide-book and the tourist, the lover of the quaint and the beautiful, but went along its way indifferent to its fame.

Down the roadway where vehicles had never passed, but where the vil­lage cattle or goats had worn a path deep into the grass, I passed. On one side a barbed-wire fence cut off not a detail of the view. On the other a steep bank had been cut away when sometime it had been intended that this should be a real highway. The scene was like a painting, so quiet and lifeless was it. From where I stood there was no sign of movement save in the gentle, sun-touched ripple that sometimes fled across the bit of water, and a line of white clothes that waved lazily in the light breeze. The cod-flakes were white with desertion where the cod lay baking, and dusty-dark where the owner had decided the sun was too warm for perfect dry­ing. Not a sound came up to me to fit in with the anchored boats, the evidences of industry—nothing save the occasional bleat of an invisible goat. The few houses which made up the hamlet were splashed around on the rock with utter disregard for everything save a white road that ran along one side in irregular curves and twists, stamping itself by its colour as the belt-line route around the pond, a mile away, on which the regatta sports were being held. Car­riages passed along it in spots of mov­ing black, followed by a thin cloud of white dust. Now and then a swifter cloud marked the passage of an auto­mobile working up speed to take the hill at high power. It was possible to look down on the village without the blot of the travel-stained road, and I turned hastily to it.

Down near the flakes there was nothing but Quidi Vidi at its best—Quidi Vidi as the tourist does not see it; and there I was content to think that, while there was a tourist-gaped part, there was also that which really counted. Out from me, over the old fish-houses, stretched the cod-flakes, now half covered with drying cod, the remainder showing up in a tangle of poles and dead evergreen brush. Farther away and facing me was a row of fish-houses, with nothing more definite as a line to toe than the irresponsible water-front. And to my surprise, on this bright day each staging was fronted by its fish­ing-boat. Later I discovered that it is part of a fisherman’s upbringing that nothing short of a postponement will keep him from the ’gatta.

But even yet I had not come to the Quidi Vidi that will long with­stand the fame that spoils. Ahead of us the road seemed to end abrupt­ly, and I hesitated to look for the out­let; but the discovery was made that the road passed beneath the flakes, as if ignoring their presence as serious obstacles or offering overhead a com­mon flake of good extent and unsur­passed drying qualities. And through the unused flakes fell the sun in a dizzy network that made it impossible to place the group of little children running towards me. All above and around the flakes covered the ground and the water’s edge. To give access to them boards were slanted up with cleats to hold the feet; or rough stairs opened above, with creaking gates to keep down the hens and over­young children. Acres of ground and roadway were buried in dark­ness beneath the cod-covered flakes, or lit with the patterned rays that came through the poles and branches. Houses pushed peevishly against the encroaching poles in all directions, resenting the fact that they were al­lowed to exist only on sufferance. The road was marked by many feet, but not a wheel. It was the real main street of the village, whatever the autos might think of the white road beyond.

Somewhere I could hear the puffing of the cars and the rapidly fading laughter of flying visitors; but they were apart from the world down there, and the descriptions that would be carried home of Quidi Vidi to listening friends would fit as well as—as tourists’ word-pictures usually do. One automobile with instincts for the hidden crept carefully around a corner and stopped at the edge of the overhanging flakes. But it did not delay. With some haste the chauffeur turned with many a back­ward plunge and forward pitch, and facing the return road darted away in a cloud of dust that had never be­fore followed this break in the scene. Another car, with longings for inti­mate views, but a commendable sense of decency, stopped on the main road, just where one of the private streets branched off and showed the corner of a covering flake, satisfied itself with looking, and then quietly went on its way with unusual modesty and respect. There are hopes for the owner of that car. There should be signs along the travelled road warn­ing modernity from leaving the beaten track. An automobile in Quidi Vidi is like whistling in a Catholic cathedral.

A woman came towards me beneath the flakes, shading her eyes from the flickering sunbeams to see me the more readily. I waited to speak to her, but she turned aside under the network of poles, her pail knocking noisily against projecting ends as she wound down to the fish-houses.

The merry sound of children broke on me from some unseen playground close at hand, and now and then they would cross the path with disturbing suddenness, to disappear as unac­countably into paths known only to these underflake dwellers. Two little girls passed, their hair done up in strange veils, and their clean, white dresses conspicuous with hands that carefully held them up from all dan­ger of dirt less deep than the knees. I accepted the invitation and asked the reason of the special garb and seeming haste.

“We’re going to the picnic,” one of them answered, describing the re­gatta as it appeared to her.

“But most of the people are there now,” I said thoughtlessly. A shadow passed across their faces, and their reply was full of disappointment.

“We know. But mother won’t let us go ’fore dinner, ’cause our dresses wouldn’t last. We’d ruther go ’thout dinner if she’d let us.”

A call came from some unplaced direction, and the girls dropped their dresses and darted into a narrow opening among the poles.

Near the edge of the village a small stream had worn its way down through centuries until it boasted a gorge entirely out of pro­portion with the volume of water. And beside the hill-enclosed pond it fell into a shower of falls that gave the finishing touch to the native beauty of the spot. A few goats struggled for existence on the sparse verdure, placed there, it would seem, more for their picture-effect than for their use.

Of course, now that I was in Quidi Vidi, I had to visit the spot from which all the local photographs are taken. To the top of the rock a well-worn path showed the reason for the advice I had received from admirers of Quidi Vidi, who saw I carried a camera. Everyone took pictures from that point. Acquiescing to conven­tions, I did the same. It proved to be another instance where custom was not injudicious. Below lay the village church, with its squatty steeple, the sole attempt at conven­tional architecture in the village. Close beside it was the tiny school, a building with ambitions, but limited realisation. Its brown sides stood out abruptly fresh in colouring; in its short length an attempt had been made to squeeze in three windows, with the result that they crowded the end-walls with terrifying effect.

Climbing down the hill to the road the village ended abruptly in the gravelled, much-travelled highway that vindicated the guide-books. Now it was a procession of cabs and car­riages and automobiles filled with tourists and residents who had select­ed the long way around through Quidi Vidi to the regatta pond. The show fishing village had ceased to be as suddenly as it had come into view. But it should always be. If anything in Newfoundland has justi­fied itself in the list of local attrac­tions, or to the traveller who sees it accidentally, Quidi Vidi can claim that distinction.

This is the first of a series of Newfoundland and Labrador articles by Mr. Amy. The next will appear in the February Number and be entitled “St. John’s: The Impossible Possible.”