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.
AT PERCÉ,
ON THE GASPÉ COAST.
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.