The pearls of the Necklace are small, and there are not many of them, only six or seven in all, but each is of the finest quality, handsomely strung together on long threads of creamy sea sand—embryo pearls-to-be perhaps—circling to partly enclose an indicated rather than attained roadstead where navigation may find a little shelter from the fury that at times strides about the Gulf.
The Madeleine Islands, though in the path of passing ships, are seldom approached directly except by the staunch little seaboat of the “Pro Patria”, “Lady Sybil”, or “Amelia” type, that once a week brings and takes the mails, freight and such passengers as chance affords.
The “Amelia” is a rugged character, a wayward “bird of passage”, at one with the unbroken spirit of the Islands she serves. We do not know what Madeleine would do without her. Variations which she chooses to make in the matter of “first ports of call” on the weather wisdom of her skipper, but add to the charm of voyaging in her to these remote objectives.
Coming thus to the “Magdalens” from Pictou, it is in the early morning, when the summer sun tips above the Eastern horizon of waters, that one beholds the first speck of land. Unfolding before you as the Amelia proceeds, a curiously-rounded beehive hill appears above a stretch of land tapering to a long sand-spit edged with curling sea-wrack. Approaching yet nearer, other fair, rounded, treeless hills complement the first. These hills, exclamatory remarks of fellow passengers soon enlighten one, are “Les Demoiselles”. They, with the sand-bars, miles in length, are the chief physical characteristics, as it later turns out, of these remote islands.
Then, after coasting miles along, the Amelia picks up an opening between a sand-bar and an island and comes alongside the Government pier at Havre Aubert on Pleasant Bay, Amherst Island.
Of course, we “put up” at Shea’s Hotel. It sounds very commonplace, as names go, but Shea’s is the heart of the Madeleines. The proprietors are three, (or is it four?) unmarried sisters of what may be briefly summed up as “the land-mark type”. Their father before them kept a cottage boarding-house, so the past is theirs as well as every detail of present-day island life. In addition to her work at the “hotel”, Miss Mary keeps a little shop on the shingle between Mount Gridley and Amherst and Miss Johanna, beside bringing the palatable food from the kitchen to the table, is the telegraph operator.
“Shea’s”, too, is the rendezvous of all the “drummers” of Canadian trade on these islands. So that although the Islands have no newspapers, one is here in daily touch with a remarkable ebb and flow of world news, all the more vivid and impressive because of the dramatic, human touches which each raconteur puts into the telling.
But the Madeleines are places where the out-of-doors is constantly offering attractions to win one to wander near and far. The views everywhere reward one’s walks. There is, too, a daily excuse to hunt mushrooms on the smooth rounded hills and grassy cliffs which few find themselves able to resist. In this intimate way one comes to know La Demoiselle.
La Demoiselle appeals to the imagination. It is one of those rare spots which remains a high-light of memory. One never forgets climbing over it, following the sheep-paths, feasting on its insular and marine outlook, or watching the rare sunsets, almost tropical in their richness, which are the lord of the day’s parting salute to these sea children.
“La Demoiselle” was the expressive name given this hill by those same early French adventurers who first called the whole group the “Necklace”. They had the imagination and fancy which pictured the land as a woman, and these fair hills, as the pulsing breasts of the sea-maiden sunning herself, with her sand-spit body awash in the waves. O Canadian sculptor behold a “figure” to hand in Les Madeleines.