A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs | Page 5

tilted sometimes at an angle which suggests that everything within must be topsy-turvy, until the vessel is afloat again. With a strong wind blowing from the north-east the bay is likely to be, at high tide, an extremely lively place for the mariner; a fact which helps perhaps to explain the sinister French name of Malbaie. The huge waves, coming with a sweep of many miles up the broad St. Lawrence, hurl themselves on the west shore with surprising vehemence, and work destruction to anything not well afloat in deep water, or beyond the highest of high water marks. At such a time how many a hapless small craft, left incautiously too near the shore, has been hammered to pieces between waves and rocks!
Tired wayfarers surveying this remote and lovely scene have fancied themselves pioneers in something like a new world. In reality, here is the oldest of old worlds, in which pigmy man is not even of yesterday, but only of to-day. This majestic river, the mountains clothed in perennial green, the blue and purple tints so delicate and transient as the light changes, have occupied this scene for thousands of centuries. No other part of our mother earth is more ancient. The Laurentian Mountains reared their heads, it may be, long before life appeared anywhere on this peopled earth; no fossil is found in all their huge mass. In some mighty eruption of fire their strata have been strangely twisted. Since then sea and river, frost and ice, have held high carnival. Huge boulders, alien in formation to the rocks about them, have been dropped high up on the mountain sides by mighty glaciers, and lie to-day, a source of unfailing wonder to the unlearned as to how they came to be there.
Man appeared at last upon the scene; the Indian, and then, long after, the European. In 1535, Jacques Cartier, the first European, as far as we know, to ascend the St. Lawrence, creeping slowly from the Saguenay up towards the Indian village of Stadacona, on the spot where now is Quebec, must have noted the wide gap in the mountains which makes the Malbaie valley. Not far from Malbaie, he saw the so-called "porpoises," or white whales, (beluga, French, _marsouin_) that still disport themselves in great numbers in these waters, come puffing to the surface and writhe their whole length into view like miniature sea-serpents. They have heads, Cartier says, with no very great accuracy, "of the style of a greyhound," they are of spotless white and are found, he was told (incorrectly) only here in all the world. He anchored at Isle aux Coudres where he saw "an incalculable number of huge turtles." He admired its great and fair trees, now gone, alas, and gave the island its name--"the Isle of Hazel Nuts"--which we still use. For long years after Cartier, Malbaie remained a resort of its native savages only. Perhaps an occasional trader came to give these primitive people, in exchange for their valuable furs, European commodities, generally of little worth. In time the Europeans learned the great value of this trade and of the land which offered it. So France determined to colonize Canada and in 1608, when Champlain founded a tiny colony at Quebec, the most Christian King had announced a resolution to hold the country. Ere long Malbaie was to have a European owner.
[Illustration: CAP �� L'AIGLE FROM THE WEST SHORE OF MURRAY BAY
"A great headland sloping down to the river in bold curves."]
As Champlain went up from Tadousac to make his settlement of Quebec he noted Malbaie as sufficiently spacious. But its many rocks, he thought, made it unnavigable, except for the canoes of the Indians, whose light craft of bark can surmount all kinds of difficulties. Perhaps Champlain is a little severe on Malbaie which, when one knows how, is navigable enough for coasting schooners, but his observations are natural for a passing traveller. In the years after Quebec was founded no more can be said of Malbaie than that it was on the route from Tadousac to Quebec and must have been visited by many a vessel passing up to New France's small capital on the edge of the wilderness. In the summer of 1629 the occasional savages who haunted Malbaie might have seen an unwonted spectacle. Three English ships, under Lewis Kirke, had passed up the river and to him, Champlain, with a half-starved force of only sixteen men, had been obliged to surrender Quebec. Kirke was taking his captives down to Tadousac when, opposite Malbaie, he met a French ship coming to the rescue. A tremendous cannonade followed, the first those ancient hills had heard. It ended in disaster to France, and Kirke sailed on to Tadousac with the French ship as a prize.
When peace came