1 8 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



Barachois, bar and tickle 



With singular uniformity the bays of all the Gaspe coast facing the 

 Gulf of St Lawrence and the Bay of Chaleurs are equipped with bars which 

 nearly sever them from the sea. The traveler by land from Gaspe 

 Basin southward through Douglastown and the Malbay, by Little Pabos 

 and Grand Pabos, passes down one arm of the bar, is ferried over the nar- 

 row sea passage or " tickle " and continues his journey along the other arm 

 of the bar ; with the tide coming in or rushing out or by heavy weather, 

 the passage across the tickle is ticklish indeed. There is a tickle in every 

 bar and the term is even applied to the inlet waters entering the bay behind, 

 as at Malbay where there is a Tickle inlet. I am assured that this term has 

 its origin in the subjective sensations of the traveler, as I have suggested, 

 though it is suspicious of other derivation. On the Newfoundland and 

 Cape Breton coast its use seems to be somewhat broader in application to a 

 broken rock reef and the channels through it. The barachois is the area 

 of semiimpounded lagoon waters behind the bar, a Haff on the Prussian 

 Baltic, and may well express that type of coastal lagoon whose existence is 

 in large part due to the inflowing of river waters. Barachois is a Canadian 

 word which according to the Abbe Ferland is derived thus : barre-a-cheois, 

 that part protected from the tumble of the waves. It occurs to me that it 

 might be from barre-eschiU {eschitcr, old French = to shun, avoid or 

 escape from). 



In the barachois of an ancient date the great deposits of much of the 

 Gaspe sandstone were laid down. 



on the beach were deserted as the sea encroached and overwhelmed them but today the 

 posts of these old stages are revealed as the beaches come up and the new stages are again 

 creeping down to the position of their predecessors. 



If we should choose to plot these present evidences of rise and fall of the crust it 

 would appear that an axis of elevation runs from Perce through the head of Gaspe bay 

 and northwestward to Grande Vallee on the St Lawrence with a trough of depression 

 eastward thereof. It would not be far from parallel with the course of Gaspe bay nor a 

 wide deviation from the trend of the rock anticlines. 



