PERCÉ.
_No visible connections...._
No 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.
[Illustration:
AT PERCÉ,
ON THE GASPÉ COAST.]
[Illustration:
A LITTLE ANGLER.]
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.