a little group of men, Basques by name, then living in southern
Europe, a remnant of the old Iberian race, anchored their ships in the
same harbor in the month of August annually. Only half a mile to the
west of me, the Saguenay, whose bottom is one hundred fathoms deeper
down than the bed of the St. Lawrence, pours its gloomy current
between the stupendous cliffs of rock which make for its resistless
passage an awful portal. These monstrous cliffs of bare, gray rock
have not changed in form or color or appearance since some force, next
to that of the Almighty, lifted them from the under world and placed
them to stand eternal sentinels at the entrance to this strange,
impressive, awe-inspiring river--for the wind and wear of unnumbered
centuries have left them cold and bare, soilless and treeless, save
where some stunted shrub, with a single root, has spiked itself into a
crevice, and there stands starved and dying, as it lives its withered
life.
"As it is to-night to eye and ear, so was it centuries ago; and so the
old Basque whalers saw it while yet the great continent to the west
was a trackless wilderness from ocean to ocean and gulf to gulf. And
Columbus and Jacques Cartier and Champlain were not, by five hundred
years, yet born.
"The harbor of Tadousac is a basin shaped like a sickle. On the west
the mountain wall of the Saguenay protects it. The eastern curve is
sheltered by vast sand lanes, scoured from the sea bottom and whirled
upward by some mighty eddy in geologic ages. To the north are
mountains of stone, their gray surface flecked here and there by
stunted fir and cedar or dwarfed birches. Between these mountains of
rock and the water of the harbor or basin is a short, narrow plateau,
lifted some fifty feet above the water line, every foot of which is
historic to a degree. On no other bit of ground of equal size on the
American continent has so much been done and suffered which can
interest the curious, touch the sensibilities, or kindle the
imagination and fan it into flame.
"There is reason to think that before the Christ was born the old
Iberian ships were here; and their descendants, the Basques, continued
the commerce which their progenitors had established and which
rendezvoused here 1,500 years after the Galilean name had conquered
kingdoms and empires. The Norsemen were here, we know, a thousand
years ago, and many a night the old sea kings of the north drank out
of their mighty drinking horns good health to distant ones and honors
to Thor and Odin. Then, late enough to have his coming known to
letters, and hence recorded, Jacques Cartier came, himself a Breton,
and hence cousin in blood to the Basque whalers, whom he found here
engaged in a pursuit which their race had followed before Rome was
founded or Greece was born, before Jerusalem was builded, or even
Egypt, perhaps, planted as a colony. St. Augustine, Plymouth rock,
Quebec--these are mushroom growths, creations of yesterday,
traditionless, without a legend and without a fame, beside this harbor
of Tadousac, whose history, along a thin but strong cord of sequence,
can be traced backward for a thousand years, and whose connection with
Europe is older than the name!"
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