Anticosti: Quebec’s Graveyard of the Gulf by Nancy Lyon

It’s about time someone made a Hollywood film about Anticosti, the island in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence Jacques Cartier cursed as “the land God gave to Cain.” He cursed Canada's Hermit Island, also known as Jinx Island and the “Strangest Island in the World,” for its treacherous rocks and 360-mile barren granite coast chilled by the cold Labrador current.

This savagely beautiful lost continent, risen from the premordial Champlain Sea 6,000 years ago, has a history that reads like a Joseph Conrad novel: Shipwrecks. Starvation. Cannibalism. Hauntings. Piracy. Lunacy. Greed. Colonisation debacles. Bankruptcy. Ruin. And with mud, sand, wild animals, and carnivorous plants, it offers Canadians the closest thing to a safari this side of Kenya.

Throughout Anticosti’s stormy history, many have dared to tame this 140-mile long, 35-mile wide island where danger and beauty exquisitely entwine. They have spent millions of dollars, pounds and francs, and built villages, logging camps, badmitten and tennis courts, and golf courses. But none have tamed her. Today Anticosti’s attraction is what it has always been: its unbridled wildness.

I can see the movie now. It would feature upbeat scenes of adventure tourists on photo safaris, driving ATV’s over the rough twisty “Trans- Anticostian” to shoot Anticosti's plunging canyons, precipitous rocky cliffs showered with a confetti of seabirds; its sinuous crystal rivers, wild bogs, sapphire waterfalls, and its lighthouses, eerie abandoned villages and cemeteries. There would be scenes of birdwatchers with binocs ticking off sightings of rare bald eagles and 220 other bird species.

... scenes of fossil hunters scavenging the cliffs for relics of prehistoric life and gaping at the Precambrian fossils in the Musée Henri-Menier. Scenes of happy anglers casting their fly rods into the Jupiter River - or any of a dozen other fighting salmon streams as clear as gin. Scenes of hikers and mountain bikers and families savoring lobster roasts -- interspersed with scenes of quite another kind...

There would be waves foaming red with blood as 16th century Breton, Basque and Spanish fisherman sent harpoons flying at walruses and whales... There would be scenes of Louis Jolliet arriving in the spring of 1681 to this uninhabited savage isle the Montagnais called Natiscousti - "land where we hunt the bear "-- with his wife, four children, five hired hands and a house servant, six rifles, two cows, a cathedral organ --and a mastery of Latin, philosophy, and mapmaking. Quebec City-born Jolliet, discoverer of the Hudson Bay and the Mississippi River, was Anticosti’s first “owner.” This doomed island was granted to him as a fiefdom and seigniory by King Louis XIV. The magnificent residence and out buildings he would build would be ransacked and burned by a rag-tag armada of fishing schooners lead by Sir William Phips.

Our Anticostian film saga would feature scenes of poor cod fishermen from the north shore and the Gaspé looting Anticosti wrecks for staples and treasure, and sometimes finding oddities: barrels of left-footed shoes sent as samples from British shoemakers to Canadian footware shops, and a hatter’s shipment of derby hats bound for Montreal.

It would pan the sun-bleached wreck of the Wilcox on the beach at Pointe Carleton. Then it would flash back in time to a rush of images of some 400 ships -- from Admiral Phipps Brigantine Mary in 1690, to that of the Fayette Brown in 1964 --that have broken their bones on the two-mile wide limestone reefs that ring the island like Precambrian shark’s teeth.

Of all the shipwreck tragedies, none is more horrific than of the Granicus, the timber ship which set sail from Quebec City bound for Cork, Ireland and foundered on the reefs near the Baie du Renard in November, 1828. The camera would pause over a scene of unspeakable horror...

The camera would close in on a mulatto face with shut eyes. Then pull back to show a large dead man in sailor’s clothes stretched in a hammock, with a knife wrapped in a silk handkerchief and a human leg knawed to the bone on the floor at his side. Panning the interior of the cabin where the Granicus survivors had taken refuge for the winter, the camera would show headless, armless, disemboweled human carcasses hanging by the thighs from the ceiling, pots stuffed with severed arms and legs hung over the fireplace, and trunks and barrels packed with salted human flesh cut into 7 by 8-inch pieces.

Who was this mulatto? Why was he the only unmutilated human in the cabin? Whoever he was, he inspired the 19th century Irish novelist Charles Lever to cast the hero of The Confessions of Con Cregan on Anticosti, in a wilderness ruled by a mulatto sailor who robbed shipwrecked victims as they washed ashore.

There would be France’s 19th century Chocolate King Henri Menier in his preposterously fabulous 30-room, $130,000 Anticostian Château. Scenes of “Le Grand Seigneur” sitting on his throne in a room heated by a sculpted marble fireplace, hung with Flemish tapestries, and illumined by 30-foot high fleur-de-lis stained glass windows imported from Paris. Scenes of the "Emperor of the Wilderness" posing with a rifle, one foot on a fallen bear, and his hand inside his shooting jacket à la Napoleon. Scenes of Menier being driven around his experimental farm in a fancy carriage...holding forth on his manicured lawns, with gents and ladies sporting sailor straw hats...and of elaborate hunting lodges and Cleopatra-type barges transporting hunters to the "bush" to stalk their game.

This French business magnate bought Anticosti in 1895 for $125,000 from a British logging company, and developed it as a private hunting paradise for himself and his rich friends. He stocked his “ petite royaume ” with beaver, silver and red fox, moose, elk, buffalo, reindeer and white-tailed deer, and - pourquoi pas? - frogs. Then he autocratically forbid the island’s remaining 300 settlers from the Gaspé, Newfoundland, the Orkney Islands, New Brunswick and Acadia to possess alcohol or firearms, or to hunt or fish. He erected a model town named Baie Sainte-Claire with a school, church, bank, bakery and sawmill, boarding house for his workers-- and a quay 1,000 metres long - the longest in Canada. A few years later, it would all be a ghost town.

Seeing the old photos of the Menier Château in W. Donald MacKay’s Anticosti: The Untamed Island, you might expect that the fabulous villa had been converted into a swanky hotel with deer-antler hatracks and bearskin rugs. But the sad truth is that it was reduced to smoking embers in 1953. Islanders watched on sadly as agents of The Consolidated-Bathurst Paper Company set it afire -- so it would not catch fire accidentally and impinge on the company’s logging profits.

Tales of sixty-pound salmon, and ...have been bringing anglers and hunters to Anticosti since 1932. These trigger-happy tourists hardly blinked at sailing a 1,000 miles from New York City and dropping a few thousand dollars for a few days of stalking the abundant white-tailed deer, shooting from their jeeps à la Great American Buffalo Hunter style - so the story goes - and fishing for salmon on horseback. After the Quebec government bought Anticosti from Consolidated-Bathurst Logging Company in 1974, hunting outfitters set up businesses catering to wealthy Americans.

Wild islands attract eccentrics and seekers, as any island-lover knows. Anticosti is no exception. One afternoon I am in the Auberge Carleton, amused by a commotion of whale watching diners leaping up from piles of lobster shells at every cry of "Baleine! baleine!." I overhear an archaeologist from Quebec’s Eastern Townships rave on and on that Anticosti’s Grotte la Patate, the largest cave in Quebec, was not created by glaciation. No, after his strict calculations of latitude, longitude, and the sun's angle at the Solstice, he is convinced that this cavern with 500 metre-long passages, and a 10-metre high entrance opening onto a vaulted chamber with an arc of absolutely perfect symmetry, could only have been designed by extra-terrestrials!

As wild as that sounds, perhaps jokes about aliens landing on Anticosti to recharge their flying saucer batteries might be deserved. Geomorphologists, geologists, geochemists have been studying the strange rings appearing on Anticosti on an isolated deposit of carbonate-rich bedrock and soil. Stewart Hamilton, a geochemist with the Ontario Geological Survey in Sudbury, says the circles could be giant natural batteries, with mineral deposit acting as a battery that is slowly and continually discharging.

Whatever the truth, the biggest island ever privately owned in the world, one-quarter the size of Belgium, does evoke the stuff of myth, fantasy, and the supernatural. Along with Titanic visions, colonisation schemes, and get-rich-quick plans. Even the Germans ventured to acquire it on the eve of World War II, causing an international ruckus.

Although Anticosti’s more recent story may lack the melodrama of the past, its wilderness is still wild, and exploring the island can take weeks. The Ecoguide d'Anticosti to the island's geology, flora, and fauna describes 18 different circuits, each so alluring it makes it difficult to choose among them.

My companions and I, using a four-room chalet on the beach in the MacDonald-Carleton sector in the north central coast of the island as our base, greedily crammed in an excursion from one end of this lost continent to the other in five days. From the village of Port Menier on the western tip, to East Point, it was a hypnotic litany of open sky, twisted pine and blown sand, nights tasting of sea spray and pine, and deer hopping across our vision so many times it felt like a hallucination.

We hiked cautiously along the edge of the Canyon Vauréal, looking out and down into 300-foot high sheer rocky faces that stretched for two miles. The spray from the waterfall danced in a rainbow-colored mist, while far below, two swimmers in the Rivière Vauréal glided like dolphins around the base of the falls.

Led by our intrepid guide, we bushwacked half the day over a deep, spongy bog, a trampoline with holes colonised by otherworldly insect-eating plants. We came to a sheer cliff edge where we hung by our knuckles to watch a ballet of seabirds drifting in the air current.We waded the limpid waters of the Jupiter River, so stunningly clear that canoes upon it appear to be floating on air. At dusk we rowed along the shore in the roseate light to see a beached leviathan, a 20-metre long finback, lying eerily on its side like something out of myth. We rowed back solemnly, under the blood-streaked sky of a sinking sun.

We haunted graveyards overgrown with daisies, lighthouses fallen to rubble, and the abandoned village of Baie Sainte-Claire in search of clues. Here the deer tended to gather in great numbers to feed and the wiley cinematographer from Montreal lured them by the dozens to his lense. “What was your bait?” we asked him later at dinner. “Chewing gum” he muttered sheepishly.

After five days we counted our Anticostian trophies: aches and scratches, black-fly bites, a Quebec license plate encrusted with mud, and pangs in the heart. A safari to Anticosti can haunt you for a lifetime.