A Week in Gaspe. 325 



blush-rose and some other flowers which had passed at Montreal 

 some time before our departure, were in bloom. 



For the present Gaspe is essentially a fishing district, and its 

 population, scattered along the coast, presents all those social 

 features which elsewhere mark those who earn their subsistence 

 from the sea. The British American fisherman is an amphi- 

 bious being, combining much of the roving adventurous tem- 

 perament of the sailor with the more steady industry of the agri- 

 culturist. At one time tossing on the bosom of the deep, at an- 

 other guiding the plough ; living much apart, yet often seeing 

 new faces and strange places, he acquires much mental activity 

 and force of character, and, if blessed with the influences of edu- 

 cation and pure religion, becomes a superior style of man. Among 

 the principal disadvantages of his pursuits are the comparative 

 isolation of many families, and the consequent difficulty of access 

 to schools, and the frequent absences of the head of the house- 

 hold from his home. This however creates an early spirit of 

 self-reliance in the young, and I have known in the fishing dis- 

 tricts mere boys to carry on the work of the family and its inter- 

 course with neighbours, in a manner which would be quite start- 

 ling to the little people of more inland districts. 



The fishing principally maintained in Gaspe Bay is that of the 

 cod, the most safe and profitable of all our fisheries, and that 

 which cultivates the most steady and orderly habits in the men 

 engaged in it. Morrhua Americana himself and his congeners 

 are steady-going animals, regular in their habits as compared 

 with the vagrant herring and mackarel, and the character of the 

 fisherman is influenced by that of the fish he pursues. Hence the 

 settlements in which the cod fishery is the staple are uniformly 

 more prosperous than those much addicted to the pursuit of the 

 mackarel ; and it is as much the good sense of the people con- 

 cerned, as any other cause, that prevents our fishermen from en- 

 tering into the latter pursuit as extensively as many over-zealous 

 people would have them. It may be annoying to patriotic per- 

 sons that the Gulf of St. Lawrence should be filled with the fishing 

 schooners of New England ; but if the necessities of an unfa- 

 vourable position, or excessive artificial stimuli, impel them to 

 this, we should rather congratulate ourselves that we are exempt 

 from these evils. Our comparatively thinly settled coasts could 

 ill afford the frequent unsuccessful voyages and terrible disasters 

 and loss of life that attend the American mackarel fisheries. In 



