136 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



East island, with its high half-ruined North East cape which peers 

 out far over the sands and is the first point of the islands that con- 

 fronts the traveler from the north. There remains in this chain of 

 sand, Grosse Isle, a divided island, one single hill standing out on 

 the west coast as North cape, the rest a headland, Grosse Isle head, 

 facing in a long escarpment the interior lagoon. 



It is an instructive feature in the structure of these islands that 

 the northern lagoon both south and north abuts against so many steep 

 bare cliffs. The waters of this great lagoon are shallow and navi- 

 gation in them is closely restricted to a narrow sinuous channel 

 through whose course the navigator is guided by a staked way. 

 These waters could not in their present condition have contributed to 

 the downfall of the rock cliffs; the interior cliffs were made in days 

 before the lagoon existed or its sands were heaped up to cut off the 

 outer sea. 



These bits of land which constitute the Magdalens have been 

 saved from total destruction by the slow elevation from the sea 

 in later stages of their history which has given birth to the sands, 

 and extended them over the wasted plateau which the waters 

 themselves have created. I should not say that this was a recent 

 effect, for these great sand bars are often a mile or more across 

 from water to water and the dunes which cap them may be 100 

 to 150 feet in height, while their mobility is restrained in part 

 by caps of bunch grass and stunted spruce. The islands and their 

 sands are the ruin wrought by the sea ; so they in their turn have 

 wrought terrific ruin to sailors and sail from the time the Euro- 

 peans began to throng the gulf. Their long, low, dark coasts and 

 treacherous bars have lain like a trap for the unwary navigator; 

 and when beating out of his course for the channels at the north 

 or the south, or in times of stress when the northeast or northwest 

 seas were driving against the rocks and sands, hundreds of craft 

 have gone ashore on these unlighted cliffs ; the bleaching ribs of 

 dead ships are seen on all the coasts, and tales of shipwreck make 

 up much of the history of the islands.^ 



Of the islets that lie off the chain only one — Dcadman's island, 

 a sarcophagus of rock a few miles west of Amherst — is note-] 

 worthy and that for its history and associations. It was gruesomely' 



1 Many of the inhabitants are castaways and M. Brassette, the venerable f 

 postmaster at Amherst, has told me that within his time there have been, he 

 thinks, not less than five hundred ships, great and small, cast upon these 

 islands. 



