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Crossing the Strait of Belle Isle took only an hour and a half on a calm sea. The weather was great and I anticipated clear skies for my visit to the North Shore.
No such luck! It soon clouded over and the following day was grey. I stayed at the Auberge des 4 Saisons that you can see here, in the French speaking village of Lourdes de Blanc-Sablon.
There is also a Blanc-Sablon village close to the Newfoundland border but it is English speaking.
Here is a 150 degree panorama taken from my hotel's terrace. Lourdes de Blanc-Sablon is a small well manicured village but there were few people out because of the bad weather. The owner of the hotel, Gilles Landry was most hospitable. He even drove me around to see the sights before bringing me to the dock to board the ferry Relais Nordik in the evening.
Not far from my hotel was this small natural harbour that had afforded shelter to the fishing boats of the first settlers.
The obvious prosperity of this big modern church speaks volumes on the hold religion still has in remote parts of Quebec.
Lourdes de Blanc-Sablon is of regional importance because of its large hospital.
Brador, the next village a few km west, is English speaking.
That sets the pattern in the Lower North Shore, distinct French and English communities alternate and coexist in relative harmony but they do not mix. The indigenous Montagnais communities (also known as Innu), are also distinct and impervious to the other two.
That can probably be explained by:
a) the British tradition of not mixing with "natives" that they considered
inferior wherever they spread their empire
b) the fact the English speaking population was mostly Protestant while French speakers
were mostly Catholic and consequently "papists".
In any case I found this three way segregation most regrettable.
The next morning, the ferry stopped around 6:30 at St-Augustin, a small trading village established by the Hudson-Bay Company in 1868. I had to take the ferry Relais Nordik because there is no road west of Blanc-Sablon before Natashquan 400 km west of the Labrador border at meridian 54W. The federally funded Trans Canada Highway goes through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and reaches Quebec only much further west at Rivière-du-Loup almost at 70W...
Here is another view of the wharf as we left St-Augustin for the village of La Tabatière.
The clouds descended and visibility became more and more limited.
We reached the fishing village of La Tabatière around 10:00 and stayed only a few minutes to load and unload cargo.
The weather was miserable outside so we stayed in and socialised. Françoise was returning home in Quebec city after an extensive backpacking tour of the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland all by herself. I admired her spunk and we had a lot to talk about.
The islands along the Lower North Shore are said to be uniquely beautiful. I don't doubt it but I did not have the good fortune of seeing them at their best.
The fog was still very thick when we stopped at Harrington Harbour around one thirty in the afternoon.
English speaking Harrington Harbour was established in 1871 by fishermen from Newfoundland. Here are a few fishing boats.
This one was so clean and well maintained that it looked like a new toy!
There was not much to see outside so I paid attention to the people I met inside.
There were a number of Montagnais aboard but they kept to themselves and made it clear by their monosyllabic replies to my advances that they were not interested to talk to me. It really hurt me to be rejected this way by my own countrymen after having managed to communicate with all kinds of people all over the world (except perhaps with Australian aborigines who also would not have anything to do with me).
Once in a while there was something to see outside like this narrow crossing between two islands but I could not stop thinking that we have a real problem with our indigenous people in Canada and in Quebec.
It is my subjective opinion that this is due to the racist attitude mentioned above that led to the establishment of reserves where indigenous people were isolated out of the way of their "white masters". Today, problems with indigenous people are most acute in countries where this British segregationist tradition prevailed (North America and Australia).
Spanish and French colonialists mixed freely with the people whose lands they occupied giving rise to a variety of Metizos, Métis and Creole people who have now become dominant in the ex colonies or at least well integrated with their "pure blood masters". I for one am proud to say that I have a Huron great-great-great grandmother Catherine Annenontac who married into the Cloutier family in 1667. Most French speaking Quebeckers have mixed blood or as the WASP would say, are "half-breed" (a highly derogatory epithet even today in WASP environments).
La Romaine was reached around five in the afternoon. Some 200 francophones and 700 anglophone Montagnais share this village.
The Montagnais people number about 15 000 in total of which two thirds live on reserves managed by the federal government. "Indians" living on such reserves are wards of the federal government that is responsible for all their needs.
Reserves have been a catastrophic failure wherever they have been implemented because "wards" that have many rights but few duties are heavily handicapped in their development into mature, responsible adults.
It is difficult to do anything about it now because the reserves system is cast in concrete by treaties that have to be executed by responsible governments even though they are not always respected by the "wards" they are supposed to protect.
After a second night aboard, the sky finally started to clear in the morning as we approached Kegaska, our last stop before Natashquan.
Commercial fishing of crab, lobster and scallops is the livelihood of the 150 people of Kegaska.
The Relais Nordik exchanged a plain container for a white refrigerated one at six thirty and we quickly left. Not a chance to chat with the local people!
The rocky shores gave way to low lying marshy land and Natashquan came into view around ten in the morning.
Natashquan is also shared by francophone Quebeckers and anglophone Montagnais. It is the birth place of the renowned poet and singer Gilles Vigneault whose ancestors came here from Havre-Aubert in the Magdelen islands in 1797 to flee the Acadian deportation.
The highway network reaches here but the bus service does not. I would have to take an expensive taxi or hitch a ride . Finally, Françoise easily arranged for a direct ride to Québec City and I got a ride to Havre-Saint-Pierre some 150 km further west where the regular bus service begins.
