FIRST IMPRESSION OF ANTICOSTI 151 



mainly of sphagnum, which has evidently displaced and is still 

 destroying the forest-covered area. The whole surface shows a 

 system of low valleys with broad divides. The valleys have 

 evidently been in part filled with drift. This glacial coating is 

 not thick and is chiefly composed of the waste of the subjacent 

 rocks; though I saw some areas where the drift material was 

 mostly from the rocks on the mainland. There were no large 

 boulders such as I had been accustomed to find in New Eng- 

 land. As a whole, it was a region of good soil, so that I won- 

 dered that it was not peopled. When we saw the place there 

 were not a dozen habitations upon it, these being occupied by 

 the three lighthouse-keepers, one at each end and one at the cen- 

 tre of the south shore, with one or two houses at Ellis Bay near 

 the west end, where dwelt two lonely men who were in a small 

 way trading with the fishermen who resorted to that miserable 

 one-sided harbor. It was the loneliest land I had as yet seen, 

 the most of a wilderness ; for though it lay on the path of two 

 hundred years of activity, by it passed all the movements 

 of French and British to the river St. Lawrence, and thence to 

 the interior of the continent, it seems never to have been the 

 seat of human endeavors. Save the lighthouses, set to warn 

 the seafarers of its dangerous coast, and the multitudinous 

 wrecks which showed the futility of these warnings, the place 

 was deprived of human interest; it appears, indeed, not to 

 have been tenanted by any tribe of Indians. 



The wreckage on the southern shore of Anticosti was aston- 

 ishing in amount. There were places for miles in length where 

 fire would have run in the heaps from one to the other. This 

 was due to the fact that the number of castaway ships was 

 large, but more to their cargoes of lumber, which supplied a vast 

 quantity of debris. A foggy shore, together with the sudden 

 gales that visited it, made the island a very graveyard for sail- 

 ing vessels. 



While the first impression of Anticosti was forbidding, we 

 learned to love it for the richness of its fossils. Probably no- 



