REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I9II II3 



earliest charts on which this island has been given any designation, 

 its name has been unaltered. It was the lie de I'Entree to the skip- 

 pers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Standing at the 

 door of the island cluster, as the navigator swung from the south- 

 ward of Newfoundland through Cabot strait, its name registers its 

 office. The records of French settlement on Entry have entirely 

 passed away. Today the population is wholly Scotch and Scotch- 

 Irish and the old stock is the Cassidys, Dixsons, ^IcCleans and 

 Collinses, stock which came in from Nova Scotia a century or more 

 ago and has multiplied almost wholly by intermarriage. There are 

 about thirty families on the island, each related in near or far degree 

 to all the rest and .it is commonly said that no outsider has settled 

 in this community in time out of mind. The laws of eugenics 

 which discountenances such close inbreeding is here honored in the 

 breach and the youth of the place instead of weaklings, anemics and 

 decrepits, are sturdy and wholesome. For every human head there 

 must be five head of fine cattle, and milk is actually freer than 

 water, for potable water is scarce; if one will not drink milk then 

 let him drink cream. 



The settlers have built their homes for the most part under the 

 lee of the eastern hills, and thus away from the most fertile parts 

 of the ground. So from the beach at Northwest point two wheel 

 ruts crunch their way over buried walrus bones, wander through the 

 grass, bounded on one side, as they pass over the badly drained 

 plaster soil, by fens and bogs sheeted with fleurs-de-lis, on the other 

 by outside cellars made of an overturned whale boat sawed in 

 twain or opened at the side, turfed over on keel, here and there a 

 Barbados puncheon for the geese, till they reach the southeast cliffs ; 

 this is the only road the island boasts. 



The farmer-fishermen are all tenants of the proprietor — the 

 estate of Sir Isaac Coffin. No land is held by them in fee; notwith- 

 standing the efforts made by the islanders and their friends in the 

 Quebec Parliament to exact concessions from the proprietor to 

 enable freehold, the settlers of Entry have taken no advantage of 

 these concessions ; and all the surface of the demoiselle hills is still 

 unleased crown land, pasture to all the community. 



The soil divides itself in quality in accordance with the rock that 

 lies beneath it, for it is all residual. Hence over the thin soil of the 

 larger demoiselles at the eastern side there is only grazing for the 

 sheep and cattle ; on the lower slopes of the mid-island, where lesser 

 volcanic domes are mingled with the sink holes and roughened sur- 



