REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I9IO 137 



sung by Thomas Moore, was the Isle d'Alezay of Cartier's first 

 voyage (1534) and is the Corps Mort of the French. Of the larger 

 islands at the north Brion lies ten miles away from Grosse Isle, a 

 block of rock three miles long with sheer walls on nearly all sides, 

 and the Bird rocks, famed for centuries for their myriads of water- 

 fowl, lie twenty miles from Grosse Isle. These and their feathered 

 dwellers, the gannets, murres and puffins, kittiwakes and razor- 

 billed auks, have been the subject of many romantic bird tales, 

 the object of numerous marvelous camera sketches, but the 

 geology of these little rocks is simple and of a piece with that 

 of the other fragments of the plateau. The tragedies of human 

 life on this isolated crag of the Great Bird, where reason has 

 often given away to madness and living has fallen foul of death 

 in the keeping of the light, have not been told to the world. 



I HISTORY OF THE ISLANDS 



T It is not to be supposed that such tattered fragments of the earth 

 as these islands could have played any large part in the caravan of 

 human events in the western world. Yet each place has been a factor 

 in the progress of discovery at least, and in this these islands have 

 their share. Their intimate history has never been written and per- 

 haps there is no good reason why it should be. Certainly this is not 

 the place in which to set forth even so much as the wTiter has been 

 able to bring together from the records of explorations and the 

 journals of the early navigators. So much only as is appropriate to 

 the occasion is here put down. 



Jacques Cartier \vas the first European to see these islands, so 

 far as we know. In his first voyage, that of 1534, his course lay 

 southward from the straits of Belle Isle and he made these rock 

 lands in succession from the north ; first the Bird rocks, which 

 he named the Isles aux Margaulx, then Brion island, to which he 

 gave the ^ name of the first Admiral of France, Philipe Chabot, 

 Sieur de Brion. Here he went ashore and of it he wrote such a. 

 glorious description as to make the reader feel he had found a 

 paradise on earth. Some of the later voyagers applied this name, 

 Brion, to the entire group of islands, but Cartier in his second 

 voyage speaks of crossing over from Brion island, which he 

 revisited, to Les Araynes — the sands of Grosse Isle and East 

 point. By this name and its variants the group was set down on 

 many of the earlier charts. The charts of the gulf which date 

 from soon after Cartier's voyages, those of Desliens, 1541, Des- 



