Far different was it in 1737, when the French sloop-of-war La Renommée stranded upon a cruel ledge of rocks, hardly a mile off shore, about eight leagues from the southern point of Anticosti.
It was in the month of November, just as winter, which could nowhere have been more dreadful than on that bleak, barren, shelterless island, was fast closing in. In their mad haste to reach the land—for the waves were breaking high over the vessel—the crew took little food with them, although gallant Captain de Freneuse did not forget to take the ship's colours.
When in the gray, grim morning they came to reckon up, they found, to their dismay, that with six months of hopeless captivity before them, they had barely enough food for forty days, allowing the scantiest of daily rations to each of the sixty-five men who had survived the shipwreck.
The sequel, as related with simple, graphic pathos by Father Crespel, one of the few who ultimately emerged from the terrible ordeal, constitutes as grand a record of human courage and endurance and as harrowing a history of human suffering as ever has been told.
The poor castaways had nothing but a little canvas to shelter them from the keen, biting blasts. Fever presently broke out amongst them. Then half of them set forth in two small boats to coast around that merciless shore for forty leagues, after which they made a hazardous dash across twelve leagues of open sea to Mingan, where French fishermen were known to winter.
The "jolly-boat" was swamped after they had been five days out, and its thirteen occupants were thus spared further misery. At last the ice setting in made the progress of the other boat impossible, and they had no alternative but to go into winter quarters and wait for the tardy spring.
With two pounds of damp, mouldy flour and two pounds of unsavoury fox-meat per day, these seventeen men, housed in rude huts of spruce boughs, prepared to endure the long agony of winter. Once a week a spoonful of peas was served out to each man; which constituted such a treat that, as Father Crespel naively puts it, "On those days we had our best meal."
Hunger, cold, and disease carried off one by one as the months dragged themselves along, until at length only three still lived, when a band of Indians came just in time to save this remnant from perishing.
All this and more is told by heroic Father Crespel with a quaint simplicity, a minuteness of detail, and a perfect submission to the Divine will, that renders his recital extremely touching.
Not less saddening is the story of the stout brig Granicus, which in 1828 went to pieces off the east end of the island, also in the month of November. Many of the crew escaped to land, but with little more than the clothing they wore.