Home ›› 03 Apr 2023 ›› Opinion
Peter Alexander Tager was a stowaway on the Good Intent, a Liverpool cargo ship carrying a load of timber back to England from Quebec. The Brophys set sail on an Irish famine ship called the Miracle, carrying hundreds of immigrants to a hopeful new life in Canada. Robert Best was returning to the Channel Islands on the Perry, a ship loaded with salt cod from the port of Gaspé.
They all set sail for different reasons but they all succumbed to a similar fate: their ships were violently thrown off course and ultimately consumed by the sandy beaches and shallow waters of the Magdalen Islands (Les Îles de la Madeleine in French) in Canada’s predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec.
Isolated in the middle of the Gulf of St Lawrence, the fishhook-shaped archipelago was an unexpected and dangerous landmass in the way of ships sailing between Europe and Quebec. An estimated 500 to 1,000 vessels fell victim to its whims, mostly in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
“Many of them didn’t even know that an island was there,” said coastguard Charles Cormier. “Once, 48 ships sank during a single storm.”
In those days, there were few lighthouses or accurate charts, and heavy winds, fog and rocky waters made navigation a game of guessing and dexterity. As a result, many passengers perished and were buried among the sand dunes. Only the most resilient survived, ultimately forfeiting their intended journeys and building a new life along the islands’ tempestuous shores.
Today, many descendants of these survivors, like 32-year-old Nancy Clark, still reside on the islands and find it hard to leave, despite the challenges they face. They are strongly rooted here as part of a tiny English-speaking community, within a French-speaking world, that lives to tell the tales of the generations of islanders that have come before them.
In the mostly French-speaking islands, there are approximately 550 English-speaking residents, descendants of people who came from England, Scotland and Ireland. Many of them were immigrants, while others were passengers on cargo ships who decided to stay after they were shipwrecked. Most settled in three communities: Grosse-Île and Old Harry in the archipelago’s north, and Entry Island (Île-d’Entrée in French), a small island in the south only accessible via ferry. For these residents, their ancestry is tied to the islands, allowing them to retain a strong cultural identity.
Many even share the same last name. In Old Harry, most surnames are either Clark or Dunn. In Grosse-Île, one of the most common family names is Clarke instead of Clark, opening a spelling debate. People in Old Harry say that people in Grosse-Île added the ‘e’, while people in Grosse-Île believe people in Old Harry dropped the final vowel.
The French- and English-speaking communities preserved their distinct identities throughout the years. Until the 1970s, there was little intermarriage between the two groups, and each community had its own church, Catholic or Protestant, and its own schools.
BBC
