INE miles from Newfoundland lies Sainte Pierre et Miquelon, Island Colony of France, her last remaining colonial possession in the “New World”, north of the West Indies.
It lies, geographically, in the group of island stepping-stones, a stone’s throw, a night out of North Sydney.
It is attended by “an old character” among sea-going craft, by name “Pro Patria”, which has been on the route between Halifax and Saint Pierre for perhaps more than a quarter of a century. She is little and worn and old, so that when she came in to the wharf on the morning of our sailing we were afraid to board her. But after awhile, seeing that the world around took her as a matter of course, we stepped across the little gang-plank, into a medley of general cargo, including several sheep on foot. Next morning we were at Saint Pierre, the harbour which has made it worth while to France to keep these “little rocky island-waifs of the western Atlantic.”
Rounding Cap l’Aigle, a little Saint Malo lies outspread before us. And from the mastheads of shipping at anchor, the tri-color of France waves spiritedly in the ocean breeze.
The “Pro Patria” drew up at the Quai de la Ronciere. The Quai was black with the crowd come to witness her coming and to welcome old friends among the new arrivals.
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All the maisons and shops about the Square that faces the Quai, have steep roofs like the parent roofs back in France and like their sisters in Quebec. On the way to the door of Madame Coste’s pension, which had been recommended, we passed the door of “The-Trans-Atlantic-Cable”, which lifts its western end out of the water here, and saw the little, yellow telegraph blank in a frame outside the door—the little sheet that is Saint Pierre’s one daily newspaper—a small “daily” this, but one the truth of whose news is wholly to be relied on. Every morning saw us reading the news with tout-le-monde gathered in front of this journal, itself literally wet and dripping from the Ocean! Marine Intelligence, indeed.
One of the earliest “signs” seen in a grocer’s window, read “Beurre frais de Cheticamp a vendre”. We looked out on it from our casement window at Madame C’s. And though “France” was written in every line of street, in every shop window, in the great feather bed on which we slept, on the smaller one with which we were supposed to cover ourselves, who could feel themselves cut off in a foreign world, with Cape Breton speaking each morning, just across the way? And when we started out anew each day, a little water-soaked schooner as often as not came gliding in to the Quai with “Down North” and “Up Along” written in every line from masthead to water-line. Ottawa, Saint Pierre and Saint John’s may be far apart, but Lamaline in Newfoundland, Cape North to Cheticamp, C.B., and Saint Pierre are as “The Three Musketeers” for brotherhood, drawn together by the ties of Trade, and the adventure that lies in “smuggling”.
We had not been long at Saint Pierre before we began to realize that the arrival of the little coastal Noah’s Arks with their floating menageries, the pigs grunting, cocks crowing, sheep too stunned to bleat, made a difference in our own menus. Madame C. chuckled whenever we were able to report a fresh arrival at the Quai.