liG THE MAODALEXE ISLANDS — PATTEHSON. 



Then, there is no good li<irl)or in the wliole group, and vessels 

 dodge round for shelter under the land. But a sudden change of 

 wind may convert a safe lee into the means of their destruction. 

 Thus, in the Pi-eat g-ale of Aup-ust, 1873, a immber of American 

 fishing vessels had taken refug'e in Pleasant Bay, when the 

 wind veered round to the eastward, and in an hour thirty- 

 three of them were ashore, it might be said on top of one 

 another, and all were totally wrecked. 



Of such events one sees memorials wherever he goes among 

 these islands. Walk along the beaches, and you will see here 

 pieces of ship plank or timber, or it may be part of a gallant 

 mast, there the remains of some old hull, or again, what seems 

 more wierd and ghastly, a row of the ends of ship timbers, like 

 ribs of a skeleton, projecting above the sand, which has closed 

 round the lower parts of the hull ; or, enter the dw-ellings of the 

 inhabitants, and perhaps you will find pieces of furniture which 

 had belonged to a ship's cabin, or articles that on enquiry you will 

 be told came from some wreck ; and in the construction of their 

 Ijuildings you may see old ship's timbers or deals of their cargo. 

 More touching is it still to see the monuments erected by friends 

 in far away lands to mark the resting place of loved ones who 

 had been cast lifeless upon these shores, or the untended graves 

 of the unknown strangers, each somebody's son, and leaving we 

 know not what friends to mourn the loss of those whose fate 

 they will never learn in this world. 



Provision is made against the occurrence of such disasters, by 

 lighthouses at the most prominent points, and by a telegraph 

 line the whole length of the islands. But still shipwrecks are 

 occurring. The autumn after my visit an Italian barque went 

 ashore in Pleasant Bay, when those on board supposed they 

 were twenty miles distant from the islands : and the summer 

 following, a vessel from Rio Janeiro, l)ound for Bay Chaleur, 

 struck on Bryon island and became a total wreck. It must be 

 observed, however, that there is no lifeboat sj^stein here, such as 

 is established on the exposed places of the coasts of Britain and 

 the United States. Whether such, if introduced here, could be 



