Chateaubriand's memoirs, VI, 5

London, April to September 1822.

‘Fac pelagus me scire probes, quo carbasa laxo: Muse, help me show how I know this sea where I deploy my sail.’

Those are the words of Guillaume le Breton, my compatriot, six hundred years ago. At sea again, I began to contemplate its solitudes once more; but across the ideal world of my reveries, like stern instructors, France and real events passed. My daily retreat, when I wished to evade the other passengers, was the maintop; I climbed to it nimbly to the applause of the sailors. I sat there overlooking the waves.

Space laid out in dual azure had the look of a canvas ready to receive some great painter’s imminent creation. The colour of the waves was like liquid glass. Broad and deep undulations appeared in their ravines, escaping from sight in the deserts of the Ocean: those quivering landscapes made the comparison meaningful to me that Scripture draws between the Earth reeling before the Lord, and a drunken man. Sometimes, one would have said that space was narrow and bounded, without projecting points; but if a wave chanced to raise its head, the flood curved in imitation of a distant shore, until a school of dog-fish swam past on its horizon, so creating a scale of measurement. Its expanse revealed itself, especially when mist, creeping over the pelagian surface, seemed to increase its immensity even further.

Descending from the mast’s eyrie, as I once used to descend from my nest in the willow-tree, forever constrained to my solitary existence, I would eat a ship’s biscuit, and a little sugar and lemon; then, I would lie down to sleep, on deck wrapped in my cloak, or below deck in my bunk: I had only to stretch my arm to reach from my bed to my coffin.

The wind forced us northwards and we made the Banks of Newfoundland. Floating icebergs were drifting in the midst of a pale cold drizzle.

The men of the trident have customs handed down to them by their predecessors: when you cross the Line, you must resign yourself to receiving baptism; the same ceremony takes place in the Tropics as on the Banks of Newfoundland, and wherever the location, the leader of the masque is always the Old Man of the Tropics. Tropical and dropsical are synonymous terms to sailors: so the Old Man of the Tropics has an enormous paunch; he is dressed, even when he is in his native Tropics, in all the sheepskins and fur jackets the crew can muster. He squats in the maintop, giving a roar every now and then. Everybody gazes up at him: he starts to clamber down the shrouds, clumsy as a bear, stumbling like Silenus. As he sets foot on deck, he utters fresh roars, gives a bound, seizes a pail, fills it with sea-water, and empties it over the heads of those who have never crossed the Equator or never reached the latitude of icebergs. You may flee below deck, leap onto the hatches, or climb the masts: the Old Man pursues you; they end with a generous tip, these games of Amphitrite, that Homer would have celebrated, just as he sang of Proteus, if old Oceanus had been known in his entirety in Ulysses’ time; but at that time only his head was visible at the Pillars of Hercules; his body, hidden, covered the world.

We steered for the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, seeking a new port of call. When we approached the former, one morning between ten and midday, we were almost on top of it; its coast showed like a black hump through the mist.

We anchored in front of the capital of the island: we could not see it but we could hear the noises onshore. The passengers hastened to disembark; the Superior of Saint-Sulpice, continuously plagued by sea-sickness, was so feeble he had to be carried to land. I took lodgings apart from the others; I waited for a squall to blow away the fog, and show me the place I inhabited, and the faces so to speak of my hosts in this country of shadows.

The port and roadstead of Saint-Pierre are set between the east coast of the island and an elongated islet called the Île aux Chiens, the Isle of Dogs. The port, known as the Barachois, stretches inland and ends in a brackish pool. Some barren rounded hills are crowded together in the centre of the island: one or two, standing apart, overhang the sea; the rest have a fringe of levelled peaty moor-land at their feet. The look-out hill can be seen from the town.

The Governor’s house faces the wharf. The church, the rectory, the chandler’s shop are all in the same area; next there are the houses of the naval commissioner and the harbour-master. Then the town’s only street begins, which runs across the pebbles along the beach.

I dined with the Governor two or three times, an extremely polite and obliging officer. He grew European vegetables on the hillside. After dinner he showed me what he called his garden.

A sweet and delicate scent of heliotrope rose from a small bed of flowering beans; it was not wafted to us by a breeze from home, but by a wild Newfoundland wind, unrelated to that exiled plant, and lacking the kindliness of reminiscence and delight. In this perfume, no longer breathed in by beauty, purified in its breast, nor diffused in its wake, in this perfume of another dawn, another world, another culture, was all the melancholy of regret, absence, youth.

From the garden, we ascended the hills, and halted at the foot of the flagpole in front of the lookout. The new French flag floated over our heads; like Virgil’s women we gazed at the sea, flentes, in tears. It separated us from our native land! The Governor was troubled; he belonged to the defeated side; moreover he was bored in this retreat, which was fine for a dreamer like me, but a harsh abode for a man interested in public affairs, unaffected by that all-absorbing passion which can banish the rest of the world from sight. My host enquired about the Revolution, while I asked him for news of the North-West Passage. He was at the edge of the wilderness, but he knew nothing of Eskimos and received nothing from Canada but partridges.

One morning, I went alone to the Cap-à-l’Aigle, to see the sun rise in the direction of France. There, a glacial stream formed a waterfall whose last leap reached the sea. I sat on a rocky ledge, feet dangling over the water that foamed at the base of the cliff. A young fisher-girl appeared on the upper slopes of the hill; she had bare legs, despite the cold, and was walking through the dew. Tufts of her dark hair showed through from under the Indian kerchief in which her head was bound; over this kerchief she wore a hat made of local reeds shaped like a boat or a cradle. A bunch of purple heather showed at her breast which was outlined by the white fabric of her chemise. From time to time she stooped to gather the leaves of an aromatic plant known in the islands as natural tea. With one hand she dropped these leaves into a basket which she held in the other. She saw me: unafraid, she came to sit beside me, with her basket next to her, and began watching the sun as I was, her legs dangling above the sea.

We remained without speaking for a few minutes; at last, I showed myself the bolder, and said: ‘What are you gathering, there? The season for blueberries and cranberries is over.’ She raised two large dark eyes, shyly and proudly, and replied: ‘I was picking tea.’ She showed me her basket. ‘You are taking the tea home to your mother and father? – My father is away fishing with Guillaumy. – What do you do on this island in winter? – We make nets, we fish the lakes by breaking holes in the ice; on Sundays, we go to Mass and Vespers, where we sing hymns; and then we play in the snow and watch the boys hunting polar bears. – Will your father be back soon? –

Oh, no! The captain is taking the boat to Genoa with Guillaumy. – But Guillaumy will be back? – Oh, yes! Next season, when the fishermen return, amongst his novelties, he is going to bring me a striped silk bodice, a muslin petticoat, and a black necklace. – And you will be adorned for the wind, the mountain and the sea. Would you like me to send you a bodice, a petticoat and a necklace? – Oh, no!’

She rose, took up her basket, and ran down a steep path, beside a fir-grove. She was singing a Mission hymn in a sonorous voice:

‘All burning with immortal ardour,

It is toward God my wishes tend.’

On her way she scattered some lovely birds called egrets because of the tufts on their heads; she looked as though she was one of their number. Reaching the sea, she leap into a boat, loosed the sail, and sat down at the rudder; one might have taken her for Fortune: she sailed away from me.

Oh, yes! Oh, no, Guillaumy! The image of the young sailor out on a yard, in the midst of the wind, changed the dreadful rock of Saint-Pierre into a land of delights:

‘L’isola di Fortuna ora vedete: Now you may see the Fortunate Isles.’

We spent fifteen days on the island. From its desolate shores one can see the even more desolate coast of Newfoundland. The hills inland extend in divergent chains, of which the most elevated stretches north towards RodrigueBay. In the valleys, granite rock, containing red and greenish mica, is colonised by mats of sphagnum moss, lichen, and broom mosses (dicranum).

Small lakes are fed by the inflow of streams from La Vigie, Le Courval, Le Pain de Sucre, Le Kergariou, and La Tête Galante. These pools are known as Les Étangs du Savoyard, Le Cap Noir, Le Ravenel, Le Colombier, and Le Cap à l’Aigle. When gusts of wind stir these lakes they divide the shallows laying bare here and there stretches of drowned meadowland which are suddenly hidden again by the re-woven veil of water.

The flora of Saint-Pierre is like that of Lapland and the Straits of Magellan. The count of plant species diminishes towards the Pole; at Spitsbergen, one finds less than forty species of flowering plant (phanerogams). Species of plants vanish with changing location: northern ones, growing on the frozen steppes, become in the south the offspring of mountains only; others, nourished by the calm atmosphere of the densest forests, decreasing in height and strength, die on storm-tossed ocean shores. On Saint-Pierre, the marsh blueberry (vaccinium fuliginosum) is reduced to the state of knotgrass; it is soon lost in the wads and pads of moss that serve as humus. A wandering plant, I have made my own preparations for merging into the seacoast where I was born.

The slopes of the hillocks on Saint-Pierre are clothed with balsam fir, amelanchier, gaultheria, larch, and black fir, whose buds are used to produce anti-scorbutic ale. These ‘trees’ do not exceed the height of a man. The ocean winds pollard them, rock them, and bend them like ferns; then gliding beneath these forests of undergrowth, raise them again; but it finds no trunks, branches, arches, no echo of its moaning and makes no more noise there than it does over a moor.

These stunted woods contrast with the tall woods of Newfoundland on the neighbouring shore, whose firs carry silvery lichen (alectoria trichodes): the polar bears seem to have snagged their fur on the branches of these trees, making strange climbers of themselves. The swamps of that island explored by Jacques Cartier, reveal paths trodden by these bears: you think you are looking at the rural tracks round a sheep-fold. The calls of hungry creatures sound all night; the traveller is only reassured by the no less sad sound of the sea; those waves, so harsh and unsociable, become friends and companions.

The northern tip of Newfoundland is at the same latitude as Labrador’s CapeCharles; a few degrees higher the Polar landscape begins. If we are to believe the travellers, there is a charm to these regions: in the evening, the sun, touching the earth, seems to halt motionless, and soon climbs the sky again instead of dropping below the horizon. The mountains covered in snow, the valleys embroidered with white moss browsed by the reindeer, the seas full of whales and dotted with icebergs, the whole landscape glowing as if illumined simultaneously by the fires of the setting sun and the light of dawn: one does not know if one is present at the beginning of the world or its end. A little bird, similar to one which sings at night in our own woodlands, makes his plaintive song heard. Then love draws the Eskimo onto the frozen rocks where his companion waits: these human nuptials, at the ends of the earth, are not lacking in joy or ceremony.