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MAPS

A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs

CHAPTER I

The Founding of Malbaie

The situation of Malbaie.—The physical features of Malbaie.—Jacques Cartier at Malbaie.—Champlain at Malbaie.—The first seigneur of Malbaie.—A new policy for settling Canada.—The Sieur de Comporté, seigneur of Malbaie, sentenced to death in France.—His career in Canada.—His plans for Malbaie.—Hazeur, Seigneur of Malbaie.—Malbaie becomes a King's Post.—A Jesuit's description of Malbaie in 1750.—The burning of Malbaie by the British in 1759.

If one is not in too great a hurry it is wise to take the steamer—not the train—at Quebec and travel by it the eighty miles down the St. Lawrence to Malbaie, or Murray Bay, as the English call it, somewhat arrogantly rejecting the old French name used since the pioneer days of Champlain. This means an early morning start and six or seven hours—the steamers are not swift—on that great river. Only less than a mile apart are its rugged banks at Quebec but, even then, they seem to contract the mighty torrent of water flowing between them. Once past Quebec the river broadens into a great basin, across which we see the head of the beautiful Island of Orleans. We skirt, on the south side, the twenty miles of the island's well wooded shore, dotted with the cottages of the habitants, stretched irregularly along the winding road. Church spires rise at intervals; the people are Catholic to a man. Once past this island we begin to note changes. Hardly any longer is the St. Lawrence a river; rather is it now an inlet of the sea; the water has become salt; the air is fresher. So wide apart are the river's shores that the cottages far away to the south seem only white specks.

Hugging the north shore closely we draw in under towering Cap Tourmente, fir-clad, rising nearly two thousand feet above us; a mighty obstacle it has always been to communication by land on this side of the river. Soon comes a great cleft in the mountains, and before us is Baie St. Paul, opening up a wide vista to the interior. We are getting into the Malbaie country for Isle aux Coudres, an island some six miles long, opposite Baie St. Paul, was formerly linked with Malbaie under one missionary priest. The north shore continues high and rugged. After passing Les Eboulements, a picturesque village, far above us on the mountain side, we round Cap aux Oies, in English, unromantically, Goose Cape, and, far in front, lies a great headland, sloping down to the river in bold curves. On this side of the headland we can see nestling in under the cliff what, in the distance, seems only a tiny quay. It is the wharf of Malbaie. The open water beyond it, stretching across to Cap à l'Aigle, marks the mouth of the bay. The great river, now twelve miles broad, with a surging tide, rising sometimes eighteen or twenty feet, has the strength and majesty almost of Old Ocean himself.

As we land we see nothing striking. There is just a long wharf with some cottages clustered at the foot of the cliff. But when we have ascended the short stretch of winding road that leads over the barrier of cliff we discover the real beauties of Malbaie. Before us lies the bay's semi-circle—perhaps five miles in extent; stretching far inland is a broad valley, with sides sloping up to rounded fir-clad mountain tops. It is the break in the mountains and the views up the valley that give the place its peculiar beauty. When the tide is out the bay itself is only a great stretch of brown sand, with many scattered boulders, and gleaming silver pools of water. Looking down upon it, one sees a small river winding across the waste of sand and rocks. It has risen in the far upland three thousand feet above this level and has made an arduous downward way, now by narrow gorges, more rarely across open spaces, where it crawls lazily in the summer sunlight:—les eaux mortes, the French Canadians call such stretches. It bursts at length through the last barrier of mountains, a stream forty or fifty yards wide, and flows noisily, for some ten miles, in successive rapids, down this valley, here at last to mingle its brown waters with the ice-cold, steel-tinted, St. Lawrence.

When the tide is in, the bay 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