It was down here, in houses looking like rookeries under the great cliff, and facing the watered-ribbon of a street, that in the great day of Quebec’s wooden shipbuilding, lived with their families the shipwrights, Hibernians and others, who came out from the Old Country to engage in the shipbuilding trade.
But the life of this street was paralyzed when the industry declined; and now many of the old, home-roofs are caving in and the old sides bulging, and only here and there an octogenarian stands in her doorway knitting in hand. Such an old orphan of a dead-and-gone industry is Mary Ann Grogan. You stop to speak with her. Her knitting needles click faster on the sock in her old hand, a-tremble with excitement that anyone should care to “hear about old times”.
At first her story is an epic of wooden hulls. Through her spectacles, as it were, you look out there to the edge of the River, the River where now rides the visiting fleet of the North American squadron, and you see the low-lying keel, the up-standing ribs, and men everywhere. And the picture calls up other craft a-building at Levis, and on the banks of the Saint Charles. And so great is the power of suggestion, that you even include in the vision the three long ships of Jacques Cartier putting in that “first winter”. “Surely, this is a wonderful old face,” you think.
From the ships, she goes on to the street itself, the picturesque little church, the Sisters’ little school, where the youngsters of the remaining families struggle with the three R’s. But her story becomes more dramatic, when she tells of the great landslide of the cliff itself, the historic landslide that carried such loss of life and destruction of property in its wake. One might read about it forever and yet not visualize it as one does when Mary Ann tells you that “the noise of it”, still lives in her old ears; “that she was born here and lived here, but never before nor since, has she heard or seen the likes of that morning.”
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The habitants of rural Quebec cling as tenaciously to the life and atmosphere transplanted here from rural France more than three centuries ago, as the inhabitants of Quebec city cling to the atmosphere of ancestral French cities.
Here are the wayside ovens, the wayside crosses and shrines, the old grist-mills, with water-wheel and upper-and-nether millstones. Here are towers and windmills descended from Seigneurie times. Here are century-old wool-carding mills with the ancient sign “Moulin a carde” over the doorway.
Here are the little maisons with whitewashed sides and steep-curving roofs whose birth-certificates date back to the days of the first settlers. Hundreds of years old are these little habitant houses, but because of the tender care they have received, they are, to-day, as clean and fresh, within and without, as though built but yesterday. Canada is rich in having in her possession such a sweet type of architecture as these dear little farm-houses of the Province of Quebec. She is rich, too, in the quaint French villages clinging to the straggling, long highway, which as street culminates in l’eglise, or the Parish church.
Quebec is especially rich in its atmospheric landscape, a landscape so dear to the habitant heart that outstanding features have become personalities. Thus, Montmorenci Falls is called “La Vache”—the Cow. A landscape too, where peaceful church-spire is seldom out of sight of church-spire. And all are within hail of some river—Saint Lawrence, Richelieu, Saint Francois, or the Saguenay.
In the matter of place-names Quebec is not behind Newfoundland, except that her taste runs to figures of the church rather than to figures of the sea. Every Saint in the calendar must, we think, have a village namesake in Quebec. On the north side of the Saint Lawrence, L’Ange Guardien, Saint Anne, Saint Joachim, Saint Gregoire, strike a balance with Saint Henri, Saint Fabien, Saint Hilaire on the south.
And if the villages be strung together aerially by church-spires, no less are they united by the quaint roads, whereon oxcart and dog-cart are as frequent as that of le cheval—roads flanked by the roof-curving, French farm-houses homing the crafts of carding, dyeing, spinning and weaving.
The spinning-wheel and the loom are not “has-beens” in the Quebec home, by-gones relegated to the attic—but intimate pieces of furniture actively a part of everyday life. And so when you step over one of these thresholds, it is to find madame spinning—her clever fingers feeding so fast from the distaff that the wheel flies around in a blur of motion; or, to find her in the room under the eaves sitting at her loom, in her hand the flying-shuttle, about her, everywhere, on chairs and boxes and overflowing to the floor, balls of yarn of all sizes and colours.
And when Madame is not weaving her “couverts” or “tapis”, she is toying with wool in some one of its preparatory stages from the sheep’s back to the finished homespun. Or she may even be caring for the home sheep, bringing up a lamb by hand or something of that sort. The habitant women are never at a loss for work.
And when Madame is not thus engaged one may happen upon her in the shade of some dooryard-tree, sitting before a homemade quilting-frame, busily quilting her hand-pieced coverlets of artistic, original designs. On these occasions she is accompanied by her little daughter of six or seven years, daintily tracing the thread-line with her little fingers in imitation of “Mama”.
In these habitant homes, Grandmere’s busy fingers take much of the knitting for the grand famille in hand. Grandmere it is, too, who moulds the high-coloured peaches, grapes, apples, plums, “hands”, and what-not figures, from the wax that is the by-product of the honey-making, home-bees.
Whenever one turns in to these country yards, the geese, that are the watch-dogs of the habitant farm-yards, herald your approach; but the work of the day is not stopped, although M’sieu, Madame, the children, one and all welcome the visitor, taking it for granted that the life and industries connected with the running of these self-supporting farms should prove entertaining to anyone.
Thrift is the keynote everywhere, but the habitant apparently never hurries. Life has not changed much in the centuries, except that with the growth of the times the habitant farms have increased in wealth, represented in part by a larger stock. Cows, porkers and sheep are everywhere. But behind the split-rail fences are the same little pocket-handkerchief patches of growing tabac in cup-like shields of white birch bark as M’sieu’s father and grandfather planted.
The passage of Time makes no radical changes. M’sieu is as handy a craftsman as ever. Nor is there any appreciable line of demarcation as to who shall do this or that, but all members of the family work helpfully together. Madame goes into the fields with the children and helps her husband to get in the hay. And, in his spare moments, M’sieu picks over and lightens up the wool a-drying on the little balcony.
On Sundays the entire family gets into the roomy carry-all and drives to Mass at the church. The weather must be bad indeed, which causes the pious habitant to fail in his attendance at La Messe.
In keeping with his deep regard for the spiritual, one is not surprised in Quebec, in more or less every household, to find, in a corner of the living-room, on a neat, little handmade shelf, a large or smaller figure of Christ, Mary, or Bonne Sainte Anne, with a tiny lamp burning before it. The same figures give distinction to the little grocery-shops and boulangeries of the towns and villages, each figure lighted by its little candle or incandescent bulb, smiling down, as in sweet benediction, upon merchant and customer.
The demand for holy figures of this type creates a rare personality of the Quebec gallery of genre in the “Sculpteur”.
Strolling along some morning, one may chance to come upon the “sculpteur” at work, at the window of his little shop in the outskirts of some St. Lawrence town, the white figure of the Saviour with extended arms in his hand, and on the table row after row of smaller figures, in various stages of completion.
The use of the religious figure is not confined to the indoors of Quebec, but over the barn-doors of the farms throughout the Province, the carved figure of some guarding Saint sheds atmosphere upon the churn, the wooden shoulder-yoke for bringing water or pails of maple-sap in its season, or on milk-pails glistening in the sun, on the fence-posts.
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In travelling in Quebec, one cannot help but be struck by the harmony between artistry and toil. This, doubtless is a French trait, curiously and happily preserved through centuries of pioneer life. Seldom indeed, if ever, in Quebec, is the most trifling thing wrought that is not made in some simple way to have its own art-character. If Madame knits a sock she combines some little thread of colour to give it character. The rag mat, which the little daughter tresses in a long braid around the back of a chair, though it may be put to hardest wear eventually, is made a symphony in colour. It is the same when M’sieu chooses to paint the little maison, he has a way of painting the ends of the house one colour and the sides another, yet effecting by a combination of two harmonious shades a whole that is—charmant.
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In passing out of Quebec City the romantic road of history is not left behind. Few villages of rural Quebec but have been the stage of some outstanding historic event or personage. Beauport
knew Montcalm. Montmorenci found the Duke of Kent so enthusiastic over “la vache” that he has a villa built almost immediately on its banks. Cape Rouge knew Cartier and Roberval. Tadousac knew the Basques and Bretons who came to fish and to barter with the Indians for furs, received some of the earliest missionaries, and to-day boasts a tiny chapel founded by them in the early years of the seventeenth century, one of the earliest Mission chapels in Canada, and dedicated to Sainte Anne. To this little church Anne of Austria gave a bambino, still among the church’s treasures.
Scattered here and there over the northern end of the Province one happens on some old Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. A house of more pretentious dimensions with steeper roof than its neighbours, usually remains as mute evidence that the great Company was once here. Such a house stands at Baie St. Paul, behind a sentinel-like line of Lombardy poplars and carrying over a door the date 1718.
Quebec is a piece of fine tapestry, in which multitudinous threads combine to form the warp and woof of the perfect whole, a whole, wonderfully woven under the hand of Romance.
CHAPTER XI.
LES ILES DE MADELEINE “THE NECKLACE”.
AVING met some notable woman, Queen or Court lady, and been charmed by her graciousness, and having recounted some of the qualities which are component of that grace, one’s thoughts turn naturally to memory of her adorning jewels. It is like that with Quebec.
Quebec’s outstanding jewels are Les Iles de Madeleine in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The earliest French navigators seeing the islands for the first time were so impressed with their beauty, they called them, in the poetic language so natural to those gentlemen-explorers of the sixteenth century, “The Necklace”. Time has substantiated the courtly compliment. For that is just what they are—Canada’s “Necklace of Pearls” on the bosom of the Gulf.
The pearls of the Necklace are small, and there are not many of them, only six or seven in all, but each is of the finest quality, handsomely strung together on long threads of creamy sea sand—embryo pearls-to-be perhaps—circling to partly enclose an indicated rather than attained roadstead where navigation may find a little shelter from the fury that at times strides about the Gulf.
The Madeleine Islands, though in the path of passing ships, are seldom approached directly except by the staunch little seaboat of the “Pro Patria”, “Lady Sybil”, or “Amelia” type, that once a week brings and takes the mails, freight and such passengers as chance affords.
The “Amelia” is a rugged character, a wayward “bird of passage”, at one with the unbroken spirit of the Islands she serves. We do not know what Madeleine would do without her. Variations which she chooses to make in the matter of “first ports of call” on the weather wisdom of her skipper, but add to the charm of voyaging in her to these remote objectives.
Coming thus to the “Magdalens” from Pictou, it is in the early morning, when the summer sun tips above the Eastern horizon of waters, that one beholds the first speck of land. Unfolding before you as the Amelia proceeds, a curiously-rounded beehive hill appears above a stretch of land tapering to a long sand-spit edged with curling sea-wrack. Approaching yet nearer, other fair, rounded, treeless hills complement the first. These hills, exclamatory remarks of fellow passengers soon enlighten one, are “Les Demoiselles”. They, with the sand-bars, miles in length, are the chief physical characteristics, as it later turns out, of these remote islands.
Then, after coasting miles along, the Amelia picks up an opening between a sand-bar and an island and comes alongside the Government pier at Havre Aubert on Pleasant Bay, Amherst Island.
Of course, we “put up” at Shea’s Hotel. It sounds very commonplace, as names go, but Shea’s is the heart of the Madeleines. The proprietors are three, (or is it four?) unmarried sisters of what may be briefly summed up as “the land-mark type”. Their father before them kept a cottage boarding-house, so the past is theirs as well as every detail of present-day island life. In addition to her work at the “hotel”, Miss Mary keeps a little shop on the shingle between Mount Gridley and Amherst and Miss Johanna, beside bringing the palatable food from the kitchen to the table, is the telegraph operator.
“Shea’s”, too, is the rendezvous of all the “drummers” of Canadian trade on these islands. So that although the Islands have no newspapers, one is here in daily touch with a remarkable ebb and flow of world news, all the more vivid and impressive because of the dramatic, human touches which each raconteur puts into the telling.
But the Madeleines are places where the out-of-doors is constantly offering attractions to win one to wander near and far. The views everywhere reward one’s walks. There is, too, a daily excuse to hunt mushrooms on the smooth rounded hills and grassy cliffs which few find themselves able to resist. In this intimate way one comes to know La Demoiselle.
La Demoiselle appeals to the imagination. It is one of those rare spots which remains a high-light of memory. One never forgets climbing over it, following the sheep-paths, feasting on its insular and marine outlook, or watching the rare sunsets, almost tropical in their richness, which are the lord of the day’s parting salute to these sea children.
“La Demoiselle” was the expressive name given this hill by those same early French adventurers who first called the whole group the “Necklace”. They had the imagination and fancy which pictured the land as a woman, and these fair hills, as the pulsing breasts of the sea-maiden sunning herself, with her sand-spit body awash in the waves. O Canadian sculptor behold a “figure” to hand in Les Madeleines.
Not the least attractive feature of the scenery are the ashes-of-roses colours acquired by some parts of the cliffs, especially those west of la Demoiselle. These colours are wonderfully effective when contrasted against the gray sea, or the velvet greenness of the cliff grass. It was while rambling along these cliffs a few summers ago that Seumas O’Brien, author and sculptor, happened by chance upon an outcropping of clay of so fine a nature that he later took some back with him to “Shea’s” and there, in a little studio improvised in the vacant cottage that was the former hotel, he soon had several charming “figures” to his credit, among them, “The Head of a Child” and “An Irish Troubadour”, one of those quaint Irish figures of village and road who entertain with stories to the accompaniment of an old fiddle.
The inhabitants of the Madeleines are of Acadian-French descent. The life which centres in the scattered cottages reveals unspoiled the Acadian spinning-wheel, the ponderous loom, and handicraft that takes the raw wool direct from the sheep’s back grazing out in the eye of the wind on Les Demoiselles, and converts it into homespun garment, sock, or tapis.
The handiwork of the Madeleine spinners and weavers reaches its highest achievement in the catalogne or bedspread. Not alone is the work fine but the favourite white ground forms just the right contrast needed to bring out the sweet colours employed in the motif. Not even in the heart of Quebec have we seen any weaving to compare with these catalognes of the Madeleines. They catch added character, it often seems, from the looms on which they are made. At Havre Maison, on Alright Island, we once happened on a Madame weaving at an old loom made from the flotsam and jetsam pieces of wood which had at different times been salvaged from the sea—here an upright out of an old mast, there a bar from a broken oar. Madame, with shuttle from the same source, rudely shaped, in her hand, was working as under the fire of inspiration, her bobbins and wools all scattered about her on boxes and on the floor, the while the attic window by which she sat looked out upon the barachois or lagoon enclosed by sand, and beyond that to the far-stretching gray waters of the Gulf.
In Les Iles de Madeleine, catalognes and tapis are heirlooms. Once at Grindstone Island an old gentleman seeing our interest in these fruits of the Island looms, bade his daughter take us into the attic and show us those which his mother had made. There were several sea chests full. And each was of sufficient beauty to justify the old gentleman’s pride in them.
Wool is an indispensable raw material in the home economy of the housewives whom circumstances have set down on these islands so far removed from marts of the “ready-made”. That is largely the reason why so many sheep are seen everywhere, there being seldom a family but owns one or more. And what fine, clean wool it is! And what excellent flavoured mutton comes to the Shea table via a boat-market from Entry Island.
The chief industry of the Madeleines is mackerel fishing, with cod running it a close second, and lobstering employing a number of old-timers whose day of fishing is done.
The waters about the Madeleines are the magnets of sealers in the Spring. But it is mackerel which chiefly magnetizes the life and sketches the characters especially Madeleinian.
Sprightly white, clinker-built, skiff-like boats are here, boats with long and graceful lines, eager in sailing but of sufficient “beam” to carry the “catch”. These harbour in haven-pools which seem to have been scooped out of the waves for just such a purpose. One of these little harbours is called La Bassin, a name which speaks for itself.
The waters about the Madeleines have a curious way of throwing up a sand-bar some distance away from, and parallel with, the beach itself, between the bar and the beach there being a long strip of water of differing widths. This lagoon is called a barachois, and each island seems to have at least one of these. The mackereling appears to centre around the Barachois, perhaps because there is something in the set of the Gulf currents which brings the marine food of the mackerel in their direction, or because the mackerel-boat, with the Barachois behind her, is never without a way of retreat in case of being overtaken by a squall. So, wishing to catch the atmosphere, one has to go down to the Barachois at dusk when the boats begin to come in. Then are seen women coming from all directions in their two-wheeled island-carts with flashing lanterns casting a flare and flicker of light, now brilliant, now dim to extinguishment, as the horses step into a rut or sink in the yielding sand.
The boats, one or two at a time, come hurrying in from the Barachois, unstepping their masts and sails and simultaneously burying their bows in the wet and heavy sand of the landwash. Then is witnessed, a spirited bit of action to be seen nowhere
else in Canada. The women pass the supper they have brought to the men, and while these hungrily consume their evening meal on the sands, Mesdames having taken the horses out of the carts, hook the traces on to the boats and before M’sieu can come to their aid, first one and then another has “clucked” to her horses, the reins in the strong hands are taut, the horses are straining and floundering in the shifting sand, madame or sturdy demoiselle skillfully keeping her own feet and admonishing “les chevals” with a commanding “Marche donc!” “Marche donc!” which would make any horse obey. Thus is attained the lively progression of the boat up the beach, to the appointed place of safety above the reach of the high tide, however angrily, through the night waves may curl and foam.
If you come here in the early morning, as many as sixty or seventy boats stand gunwale to gunwale on different parts of the long beach, answering the roll call of a great industry.
But it is on the north shore of Amherst, about the sand bar joining Amherst with Grindstone and partly enclosing Basque Harbour, that one sees still other groups and figures essentially of the Madeleines. Women and children, horses and carts, and dog-carts here appear far out from land, afoot in the low water that washes for miles the undersea sandbanks. Women and children and lassies with Breton caps, stand ankle-deep in the water with hand-made three-pronged forks, like the trident of a sea-god, in hand, digging and digging clams for bait, piling them into the receiving baskets and pails, and thence into the waiting carts—the carts in which island horses doze between the shafts, the rising tide lapping their fetlocks. It is a rare sight this clam-digging in the Madeleine barachois! And so far as we know one not duplicated anywhere in America. It occurs only at low-tide and it is therefore possible to pass any number of times at full tide and not see anything of it. But should it once be chanced upon, it will never be forgotten. Never was there a “piece” with so much atmosphere and action. While the tide is still ebbing the women wade far out to the edge of the clam line and begin their uncovering of the mollusc harvest. Even after the tide turns and begins to come in, they still hold their own with a bold front, retreating a few inches only, at a time. Atmospheric indeed is the effect produced by all these people, the horses in the two-wheeled carts, and the tiny dog-carts, when they are half shrouded in a soft wet fog creeping in from sea. Then it is as though Nature wished to reiterate that ’tis she who is the Great Artist, composing Aquamarines that no mere human artist can ever hope to touch.
Sometimes the low tide happens at night. And at dusk one meets the women driving in their carts, the lighted lanterns beside them, lanterns which later in the evening will appear to one looking off to the barachois like so many amphibious fire-flies dancing above the waves and lighting up the restless waters and the night gloom with a ghastly flare.
This night-scene is of even rarer quality than that screened by the day. Certainly this is exclusively a Madeleine canvas.
But the clamming is a serious industry. On it hangs the success or failure of the mackerel-fishing. Only so can M’sieu start out in the little boat early in the morning to fish. Only so can the “Mackerel from the Madeleines” arrive in Halifax to keep busy caulkers and brine-boys, and keep flowing the stream of Canadian export trade in fish.
But not until one passes on the highway at Grindstone some morning when it is too rough for the “Amelia” to make her call at Etang du Nord, and meets the procession of island-carts with their loads of barrels going overland to the public wharf on the lea-side of the island, does one carry any idea of the vast number of “Number Ones” which actually go out from here to Halifax, and thence, to the tables of the world.
It is on “shipping days” that one realizes that Madeleine, no less than Evangeline, is a sport, risking all her business success on the turn of the “barrel”.
But fish is everywhere—a summer trade. And summers pass all too swiftly. It is in winter that Madeleine is thrown in upon herself; cut off from the world by the ice for six months of the year.
It is then the Mesdames of the islands—Amherst, Grindstone, Alright, Coffin, Grosse Ile and Entry—settle down to the loom, take the old spinning wheels between their knees; and make the Catalognes, the Catalognes, the equals of which are seen nowhere else in all Quebec. It is in winter the island-artizans choose and blend the colours that make the prettiest “couverts” to use and to lay away in the old sea-chests.
In winter, spinning by the window, madame looks out upon long endless stretches of ice-imprisoned sea, solid masses of the Gulf ice that closes navigation and separates herself and family from habitant families ashore. Yet because “the Sea” is in their blood not one of these Islanders would change places with the people ashore. “What of adventure,” inquire they, “is there in inland lives compared with ours, literally held in the sea’s hand? Mais, non.” The Amelia makes her last trip a few days before Christmas. But even so, although no one can get off the islands after that, news still comes and goes by way of the Telegraph Cable and “Miss Johanna” becomes a figure in the limelight, as operator.
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Lying to the North and somewhat apart from the main pearls of “The Necklace” are “The Bird Rocks”.
On the largest of these a lighthouse stands, an aid to navigation. It is a very lonely spot and no one except the lighthouse keeper and his family live there. But these desolate rocks have a claim on Romance through the thousands of wild sea-birds, who in summer make them their habitat and nesting-place. These sea-birds, chiefly the beautiful cafe au lait coloured gannet, have three major haunts in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, at these “Bird Rocks”, at Percé Rock and at Bonaventure Island off the Percé-Gaspé shore.
The first signs of human life the lighthouse keeper sees in the spring are brought by the Sealing ships coming into the Gulf after seals that frequent the ice pans.
Usually the keeper of the Bird Rock Light is a Madeleiner from Grindstone or House Harbour. Once, spending a week at Havre Maison we boarded with a widow whose husband had been a keeper of this lighthouse. Graphic indeed were her tales of the weirdness, loneliness and yet fascination of the life. She told, too, what happiness was theirs on seeing the first birds coming in the spring.
CHAPTER XII.
PERCÉ.
O visible connections exist between the faraway Iles des Madeleine and Percé, between Mai Baie and Baie des Chaleurs; but, in the fact that both the Bird Rocks and Percé Rock have been selected as summer homes and nesting-places by those beautiful creatures of the air, the wild sea-birds, there is a certain psychological bond of the deepest nature.
Percé Rock, according to surveyors, is fourteen hundred feet long and three hundred feet high at the highest end. It is a rock that carries in its sharp, almost cutting lines, an air of great dignity and strong personality. It is outstanding. People speak of it as “The Rock”, as if nowhere around this rocky coast there were any other like unto it. And there is not. Along the Gulf it is a landmark; along the entire Gaspé shore a dominating character.
In itself it is barren and without life, more than a stunted scrub of tree and a little sprinkling of green at one place on the top. Its almost vertical sides are of a metallic, coppery hue. Its heart is burnt out. Geologically it is a mausoleum, a grave, wherein millions of trilobites were buried and turned to stone in that far away age to which the trilobite belongs. Yet it is this great heart of stone that the seabirds have undertaken to warm and have succeeded in making a thing of life, with mother hearts and baby cries, and the flashing wings of their constant coming and going.
The bird life here is a sort of commonwealth, in which the magnificent cafe-au-lait colours of the gannet predominate. “Watching the birds” is one of the pastimes indulged in by all visitors to Percé. And there seem to be more and more people here every year just “watching the birds”.
With a powerful telescope you can see mothers feeding the young mouths in the seaweed nests. You can see them teaching the A. B. C. of flying to youngsters yet in their pin-feathers. And you can see them on the day they almost push their young to their first take-off. And when they have taught the nestlings to fly, they must, having conquered the air, begin all over again on that even more difficult element, the water.
Out there beyond the Government Pier which the mother does not mind in the least, having somehow sensed that the same parental hand behind the old piers holds her and her brood in its protecting palm, (both Ottawa and Washington are pledged to the protection of these wild birds of the sea), she gives her brood their first swimming-and-diving lessons and afterwards, almost without telling, they learn “to fish” for themselves.
Apart from The Rock and its feathery crown of life and its raucous voice, stilled only at night, other, many human “birds of passage” have from time to time landed here at Percé.
Along the long North Beach, fenced on the West by walls of rock—Les Muraille’s and beetling Cape Barre—came, five hundred years ago, the fleet-winged bateaux from whose decks stepped down that most picturesque figure of the early Canadian stage, Jacques Cartier.... After him came the Recollets to say Mass on the beach, and set up the parent wooden cross on Mount Joli. Years and years after these, a colony of Jerseymen from the Channel Islands was weaned from the tides that race about Jersey and Guernsey to fish in the waters of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence contiguous to Percé, and to carve out for itself homes and a footing in the business world of Nouvelle France, now merged in Canada. Side by side with the habitant homes of Percé are the places of business and the cosy homes of the Channel Islanders, now among the leading figures of the fish and general-merchant business of this shore.
The fleet of fishboats, anchoring in the little haven afforded by Cape Barre, are thus still curiously French in model and rig, notwithstanding the fact that many of their old sides and seams are tarred in sisterly fashion with the old boats of Newfoundland. Of course, Percé has its up-to-date motor boats, etc. But for all that, the heavy fishing, the big catches of morue, are still brought to the North and South Beaches by these old-timers among boats.
Of all the fisherfolk of the long Coastal road—and what a road it is—none work so late at night or so much by lantern-light as those around Percé beach. The land-end of fishing always makes a picture, wherever happened upon, but when the twinkling of lanterns lights the faces of the splitters at work about the splitting tables and the fish gleams white as it slides from the table to the tub as it does at Percé there is something Romantic indeed in the scene. Till ten, even twelve, and once as late as two o’clock in the morning, we have seen the lanterns gleam on Percé Beach and watched the black figures of the men flitting to and fro with hand-barrow and cart, carrying the loads of cod into the waiting room to the hand of the salters.
No less Romantic is the pageant afforded by the boats and their lanterns upon the nights on which the men jig for squid. Squid is the bait in favour among Percevian fishermen, as clams are in the Madeleines, and bait-getting is an industry in itself, here as there.
In the darkness of the night a long line of black boats, like huge bodies of lantern-fireflies, may be seen jigging for squid, under the pale light of the stars, half a mile or so beyond the Government Pier. The effect of these queer dancing lights above the black water and the blacker boats, when seen from shore, is just as weird and romantic as the clam scene out there further, in these same Gulf waters about the Madeleine Islands. A difference lies in the fact that that scene is staged by women and this entirely by men. At Percé the men get their own bait, without aid from their women-folk, and at the same time must go out to the fishing-grounds with the morning tide; while in the Iles des Madeleines, as we have shown, it is the women who stand in the trenches of the farms-of-the-sea, turning out with their homemade forks the clam-nubbins that are the potatoes of these amphibious fields.
Along the codfishing-shores of the Maritime Provinces and in all the long line of Newfoundland-Labrador and Saint Pierre outports the women are co-workers with the men in this great coastal business of Cod. It is their hands that double the help on it, enabling the men to handle large catches because they can stand to the line for longer hours. The Mackerel-men of the Madeleines never have to ask where bait’s to come from.
The women-folk of Percé are in no way to blame. Different conditions are here. To jig for squid one must get into a boat. And it will be noted that coastal fishwives stop at the water’s edge. The most venturesome among the women, lending the strongest hand with the fish, always stops short of getting into a boat. With terra firma under their feet they are helpmates indeed. But the instability of a keel afloat shears them of all strength. One and all coastal women strange as it may seem are landlubbers of the deepest dye. So, Percevian fishermen must perforce hold up both ends, and that they do it well the splitting-tables and the flakes of both the long beaches, North and South, testify.
A character often encountered on the North beach is the old lobsterman who, too old for the boats, has taken to lobster-pots. No greater picture is made from the pierhead than that made the moment he in his little punt pushes out on the silver-gray sea against the projecting headland of the great Rock about which the wheeling sea-birds circle and cry.
Another beach character is the man with the ox-cart, who comes to gather seaweed for the fields. Deadweed and other seaweeds washing in all around this Gulf coast create an atmosphere all their own, coming as they do in deep drifts along the shelving beach, themselves the “crop” of many an undersea garden near and far; a voluntary contribution to the land-gardens that are enough of sea-salts themselves to understand and appreciate the sprawling, dragon-like motif thrown up by the sea.
And as the seaweed cart goes geeing and hawing along the Percé main streets to some hinterland farm, no fragrance seems so tangy and refreshing as that thrown out by the dying weed, blindly obedient to the laws governing the great Epic, spelled by Production.
It would indeed be strange if the superlative coastal scenery of Percé—its rare cliffs and rocks so magnetic to the scientist, both Geologian and Zoologist—had not drawn to itself the artist, the man or the woman to whom line and color are as meat and drink. An occasional figure, solitary on the pierhead, holding palette and brush, essaying a group of schooners and boats clumped against the pierside, may make a figure in your morning picture of the Gulf and the riding boats flanked by the bronzy rock cradling the birds. But these figures are rare—one or two in a summer perhaps. Of these Mr. James is still the outstanding figure and his is—“a dead command.”
James came to Percé twenty-five years or more ago. A landscape artist of note, he hailed from Philadelphia. Percé in the individuality of her headlands and cliffs, sharp as edges of broken china, in the towering Mount Sainte Anne, in the spaciousness of the Amphitheatre facing toward the mountains that the geologist says are the vertebrae of the continent, in her homing birds, in the sprightly boats continually going and coming, wound about his artistic soul all the magic of her spell. He built himself and wife the home that so gracefully sits on the top of Cap au Cannon. From here he sallied forth day after day with his canvasses. Home here he brought them metamorphosed, replicas of the beach, the cliffs, the vanishing roads, the great Rock. Home, too, from his many jaunts and his many friends among the country-folk, he brought the wonderful gems that go to make up the valuable and interesting James collection of old Lustreware. Both Mr. James and his wife became a part of the Percé life. At his death Mrs. James continued to live in the home on the cliff. The poor of Percé speak of her as “Our Lady of Percé”, playing on the word Mercy. For the poor and needy have in her an understanding and helpful friend indeed. From her husband’s paintings she has had postcards made and with the proceeds keeps many a lone old woman under the wing of comfort, whom the dark days of a bitter Gulf winter must otherwise pinch.
It was Mrs. James who sponsored Marie’s little tea-house five miles out along the Coulie toward Corner o’ the Beach. Every summer tourist knows “Marie’s” where the tables ranged on the grass are enclosed with windshields of sweet smelling spruce trees cut and stuck into the ground and weighted down with wild strawberries and country cream.
And speaking of “Marie’s” reminds us that the wayside oven and the big French loaf are characters of the Percé highway—reminds us that here la vache wears a neckyoke as in Les Madeleines.
Percé boasts the spinning wheel, with Madame, second to none of her habitant sisters up and down the whole Province, in her mastery of laine.
Among its quaint maisons Percé has an unique figure, happened upon by us nowhere else—the Beachmaster’s Cottage. The Beachmaster as a “character” was unknown to us till we crossed his “stage” at Percé.
Bonaventure Island, too, lies three miles offshore—Bonaventure Island that harbours the memory of Peter Duval of buccaneer fame, skipper of a privateer named the Vulture. How he did harry the French coast during the war with Bonaparte! Who knows but Captain Duval was a connoisseur in Lustreware, who knows but many of the beautiful pieces in the James collection and others in many a home of this shore crossed the seas at his instigation? At any rate, Bonaventure Island, which was his last “ship”, is now skippered by kindred spirits, the wild sea-gulls whose ancestors may many a time have snatched of the crumbs that washed astern from the Vulture’s tables.
CHAPTER XIII.
WAYSIDE CROSSES AND GARDEN SHRINES.
ANISHING roads,” no less than “the broad highway” of rural Quebec, are all more or less edged by wayside crosses and tiny garden shrines. From east to west and north to south the Quebecquois travels a la rue Calvaire.
But this via crucis is by no means a via dolorosa. Far from it! For the habitant does not set up his handmade, roadside cross, abounding with symbols of the crucifixion, in a spirit of sadness, but rather as the expression of a happy life full of rich traditions of such crosses in Old France, brought over by his forefathers, and reproduced here in old Quebec since Cartier’s time.
The wayside cross is now part of the landscape, in the habitant’s eye, and to his mind, a happy calendar by which to notch events. It is in this spirit that the habitant landholders and heads of families in old Quebec set out to carve “the cross” that is the age-old milestone of the roads—the cross by which they will be remembered long ages after they have taken the hill-road to the cimetiere.
The carving is a winter-evening task, begun after the day’s work is over, when the grande famille have all had super. C’est bon. All the family is interested in le pere’s intention to make a new cross. The wood in hand is carefully gone over and the best pieces selected. Measurements are made “according to the cloth” and the sawing and planing begun. Mon Pere’s ideas are rounded out by suggestions from le mere et les enfants. Not one evening but many are consumed, till the winter runs away. And when in the spring all is ready and the new cross is set up, what wonder if it has an individuality all its own? This being the way these roadside crosses grow, there is good reason why not any two are alike.
One sometimes notes these crosses, shrines and chapels in the heart of towns but usually they stand beside country roads in coastal, agricultural and mountain sections. It is country-folk who set up these rich milestones of the highway, in old Quebec. And whenever they appear in the heart of town or village it means either that some old-timer caused them to be so placed or that they were before the town, and that the latter encroached.
Such a case as this is to be seen in two little wayside chapels to bonne Saint Anne in Levis. Modern town life has encroached upon them to such an extent it is extremely difficult to get even a picture of them clear of telegraph poles, wires, etc., yet these little chapels, built one in 1789, the other in 1822, before electricity was heard of for power and light, are still in use for the feast of good Sainte Anne.
What a cyclorama of Canadian history these little chapels could sketch for the pilgrims of to-day, looking out from their doorways upon the bosom of the Saint Lawrence. How many a vivid chapter of the olden days was read by these little wayside shrines before it happened. Through what stirring times has the little red light before the altar not pointed the way of hope to men along the road of life? We hope that Levis will never grow so big but she will have a place for these wayside chapels that belong by right of the years and the things they have seen, to all Canada.
But to the highway voyager of to-day it is their size that points a revelation. How few, he thinks, must have been the people of this parish at the time these chapels were built, if all went to mass at the same hour. It is a tradition in Quebec that “at first wayside crosses were set up at points where mass was said in the open air and later these little chapels were built.” If this be so, here on this spot missionary priests of pioneer times caused “a wayside cross” to be set up long years before the foundation stone of these chapels was laid or Levis as a town thought of—another reason why the sacred land should never be absorbed by the town.
One reads much and hears much in Quebec of the landing of the great sea-adventurers of the French discovery, who invariably brought with them missionary priests. No tale in history appeals more to the imagination than the landing of the Recollet Fathers at Percé and the setting up of the cross on the bluff headland opposite Percé Rock. If you go to Percé to-day—like “the weathered skeleton of time”, the cross with its extended arms silhouetted against the sky, still stands on the same spot chosen in 1535. A similar wealth of tradition gathers about the head of the little wayside chapel at Tadousac. To the visitor, much of the charm of Tadousac centres in this chapel dedicated to “la patronice du Canada”—bonne Sainte Anne—and out of use these fifty years except on special occasions, chief of which is naturally the fete day of good