EARLY DEVONIC HISTORY OF NEW YORK AND EASTERN NORTH AMERICA 23 



is the Still mighty flank of a mightier range. One may here start at the 

 waters of Gaspe bay and climbing upward, a short half hour will bring 

 him to the cliffs of Bon Ami, 700 feet straight over the waters of the 

 St Lawrence river ; off at his left above the curve of Rosier Cove towers 

 bare St Alban, 11 00 feet, the highest point reached by these rocks in 

 their upward inclination toward the north. If he will take the King's 

 road, which traverses the peninsula from Grande Greve to Cape Rosier, it 

 will lead him at first gently through a way embowered in evergreens and 

 bring him out with startling abruptness almost to the hight of the Bon Ami 

 cliffs. Lying on his belly on the grass of the roadside, he may test his 

 nerve by watching the waves break at the base of the concave cliff, 

 hundreds of feet below him. Mount St Alban rises again at his left, a 

 gray bare rock wall on its sea front, embrasured in a sloping talus of its 

 own fragments and resting on a projecting rock point, the Quay, at the 

 edge of the water. St Alban seems the very genius of the place, a stern, 

 weather-beaten god, skirted in his kirtle of fallen rocks, with foot planted 

 forward on the strand, bidding an impotent defiance to the onrushing waves 

 like another royal Knut who himself may have to take place among the 

 myths of geology as a like imposing sea cliff. The King's road, reaching 

 the summit of the cliffs, becomes thence well nigh impossible, pitching 

 downward at an unknown angle, but it comes out at last after many tribula- 

 tions to the traveler, to the broad, flat triangle of Cape Rosier where rest 

 the upturned Cambric slates beneath the great limestone series of which 

 we are about to speak. 



Some of the earliest French explorers, perhaps Champlain, termed this 

 narrow peninsula, this spine of land, the Forillon.' In early maps and 

 in the Jesuit Relations the name, often spelled Fourillon, is attached 

 only to the cape now called by the English Shiphead. Out at the end of 

 Shiphead stood the obelisk of rock which the sea had separated from the 



' Describing the hills and headland of this peninsula, Nicholas Denys (1672) says: 

 "Cette pointe se nomme le Forillon, il y a une petite Isle devant oules pecheurs de Gaspe 

 viennent faire leur degrad pour trouver la moliie." Description geographique et his- 

 toriques de Costes de I'Amerique septentrionale. Avec Thistoire naturelle du Pais. p. 234 



