A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs | Page 5

becomes a shallow arm of the great
river,--the sea, we call it. The French are better off than we; they have
the word "_fleuve_" for the St. Lawrence;--other streams are
"_rivières_." Almost daily, at high water, one may watch small
schooners which carry on the St. Lawrence trade head up the bay. They
work in close to shore, drop their anchors and wait for the tide to go out.
It leaves them high and dry, and 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 À 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