PROGRESS BY LAND, 1818-1910 163 



mysteries with their Indian key. The Indian key — if the 

 metaphor may be allowed — is a paddle. They paddled up- 

 stream from Cabot Strait or its neighbourhood, hunted all 

 over Cormack's plateau, carried their canoes across short flat 

 ' portages ', and paddled downstream into the Gulf of St. Law- 

 rence, or more rarely into the waters of the Atlantic. Thanks 

 to the paddle, their topographical knowledge was a good 

 century a-head of the Englishmen's knowledge, and the paddle 

 was an emblem of power as well as an instrument of know- 

 ledge. Except in the Beothic sphere of influence, they, and 

 they only, possessed the land. Their methods were European 

 but European with a difference, and the English ignorance of 

 what they had been doing was due not to any diff'erence 

 between Indian and European methods, but to the abandon- 

 ment by Englishmen of European methods in colonizing 

 Newfoundland. 



All the Micmacs were Roman Catholic Indians from Cape and that 



Breton Island or Nova Scotia, and, like the white men, came ^^^^^ ^^^^ 



' ' . ' settlements 



spontaneously from overseas, first as visitors, then as settlers ; at Conne 



but they came to hunt, and until they had a firm footing in 'f'?^/ ''^ 



the land they avoided Englishmen. Barachois, 



Indians and Englishmen went diff"erent ways although '^^^1'^^^ ^^''^ 



their methods were sometimes superficially similar. Like the dencies of 



white colonists, the Micmacs looked to their old home across ^y^ton 



the seas where the chief-chief resided, and resides to this Island, 



day, in St. Anne's Harbour, Cape Breton Island ; ^ and, like 



Englishmen in every English island of the world except 



Newfoundland, they used to go overland from a principal 



fixed base on one coast to distant goals where less important 



bases had been established on other coasts. As with their 



English neighbours, their principal fixed base was and is on 



the part of the coast nearest to the land of their fathers. In 



Cormack's time there were two principal Micmac bases — on 



1 Sir William MacGregor, Report on the Micmac Indians, 1908 ; 

 Jukes op. cit., vol. i, p. 176. 



M 2 



