OBSERVATIONS ON THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS 



The jMagdalen islands, lying in the very heart of the Gulf of 

 St Lawrence, are a chain of disjected and sea-wracked remnants of 

 continental land, standing today as they have stood since the begin- 

 ning of navigation in these turbulent waters, a fearful menace to 

 the sailor and his craft. The chart shows them stretched out like 

 a long key lying crosswise of the waters in a direction which cor- 

 responds to the general northeast-southwest course of the basal 

 rock folds and depressions which govern the fundamental contour of 

 all the lands of the lower gulf. If the eye will follow the 20- fathom 

 line on the chart, it will be seen what a tremendous platform has 

 been carried away by the waves in the gradual wasting of the land 

 to this slight depth and what slender, broken remnants of it now 

 remain above the water line. A 20- fathom elevation to the water 

 line would throw all the chain of islands into one land mass and leave 

 them as slight elevations along the rib of a broad plateau which, 

 altogether, would present many hundred times the area of the land 

 now remaining. Even the 10-fathom line sweeps about all the 

 islands, tying them into one, and reaches out to take in Brion island 

 at the north and the Great and Little Bird rocks further east; so 

 that if the water might stand now at this 10- fathom line, or in the 

 days when it did so stand, the broader JMagdalen island w^ould 

 stretch its key out into a long, slender and gracefully curved handle. 



Today these islands difter only from the isolated rocks of Brion 

 and the Birds by being fringed with sand spits and dunes and tied 

 to one another by tremendous sand bars, which the seas at the east 

 and the west have piled up into a double chain, leaving betw^een the 

 great interior lagoons, Basque harbor, House harbor, the Great 

 Lagoon and its branch at the extreme north behind the dunes of 

 Grosse Isle and East point. Thus the sea has tried to bury the 

 remnants of its own destruction, tossing back to these feeble frag- 

 ments of the land its very ruins. 



Compared to the area of the Magdalen group as it appears on the 

 chart, the actual area of rock land is small and resolved into little 

 insular units of soil and of population. Entry island stands at the 

 eastern terminus of the chain and faces the entrance to Pleasant 

 bay, sometimes the least, and sometimes the most dangerous harbor 

 on all the coast. Westward and separated from Entry by the tre- 

 mendous spit of Sandy Hook is Amherst island, whose harbor and 



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