Posted July 16, 2010 by CAPER in History. 1 Comment

Aerial view of the islands

A BIT OF FRANCE OFF THE COAST OF CANADA

(Realizing that St. Pierre and Miquelon are not quite Cape Breton Island news, with it’s everlasting connexion to the Island through commerce and it’s people I thought it would be interesting nevertheless to describe it to you. Many forefathers of Cape Bretoners moved here from the Islands, many more went there after the British ousted them from Acadia and later returned to Cape Breton and the Mainland. And of course during the Rum-running days numerous Capers spent many hours at St. Pierre loading up on rum, champagne, whiskey and all kinds of alcoholic beverages and lugged it ashore on coastal Cape Breton to be later transported to the U.S.. So here is a description of what the islands and its people look like. – GTF)

Saint Pierre and Miquelon – Going off the surf map

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16 miles from the southern shores of Newfoundland, the tiny French island territorial collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon is a little bit of France in the North Atlantic.

Unlike Quebec, Saint Pierre and Miquelon are French through and through, and are not bound by the dual language dilemma that plagues the Canadian province. With just over 6,000 year-round residents, Saint Pierre and Miquelon manage to retain their French culture in a unique sub-arctic island style. The islands also have the dubious distinction of being the only place a guillotine was used in North America.

Though I’ve yet to come across any surfers who have explored the islands, their location alone puts them in a window for serious swell. A little searching will turn up a handful of photos online, featuring waves and coves with corduroy lines stretching to the horizon. In short, Saint Pierre and Miquelon is awaiting exploration by surfers.

Getting there generally means going to a major Canadian city first. Full thick rubber is an absolute necessity almost year-round, with the waters off the islands topping off for a very brief period in the 50s and then dipping to the freezing point for most of the year. Get out there, get off the surf map and go explore. (Oh… and tell us all about it!)Bottom of Form

St. Pierre

Al Capone slept here when the gangster was running bootleg liquor into the United States during Prohibition. Charles de Gaulle stopped in as President of France. And the French Navy scored its first victory of World War II with an invasion here launched behind the backs of Canada and the United States.

The islands of St. Pierre, Miquelon and Langlade are rich with anomalies, not the least being their status as France’s last foothold in North America. Some 900 miles northeast of New York and a scant dozen miles off the Newfoundland coast, they offer a slice of overseas France. The 6,000 inhabitants are descended mostly from Breton, Norman and Basque seafarers who crossed the Atlantic to fish for cod and settled down.

The windswept islands were discovered in 1520 by the Portuguese explorer Alvarez Faquendez. He called them ”the islands of 11,000 virgins” because he sighted them on the feast day of St. Ursula, patron saint of virgins. It was not until 1536 that Jacques Cartier claimed them for France. For the next few centuries, the British and French squabbled over the islands until France, having already forfeited the rest of its North American empire, was conceded St. Pierre and Miquelon by the Treaty of Paris.

Yet for all the fresh croissants and French wine, St. Pierre and Miquelon is a destination largely overlooked by American tourists. The islands, akin to a French-speaking Nantucket, might be better known but for thick fog that blankets them for much of the year, making airline flights from the Canadian mainland uncertain. Last July, the islands sat out 23 days of fog. But on a later visit in September, my wife and I encountered only warm sunshine.

It is safest to take a daily bus in summer from St. John’s, the provincial capital of Newfoundland, to the ferry at the fishing town of Fortune. We rented a car for the 225-mile trip to Fortune, turning south from the Trans-Canada Highway into the bracken-covered moors of the Burin Peninsula. We arrived in Fortune well ahead of the St. Georges, the orange and white ferryboat that chugged into the harbor with the French tricolor flapping from its stern.

The watertight cabin held about 100 seats facing forward like those of a movie theater, but despite a cold spray, we preferred the bracing air on the open afterdeck. The boat churned through the choppy sea around the steep headlands of the Newfoundland coast before veering south. Soon the islands loomed out of the sea and we sailed past the fish processing plant into the harbor of St. Pierre.

It was an abrupt transition from Canada to France. In the customs shed on the quay, a French official in a blue military shirt stamped passports. Immigration officials at St. Pierre will also accept other evidence of United States or Canadian nationality including a driver’s license.

Outside, on Charles de Gaulle Square, a policeman wearing a blue kepi casually eyed the passing Citroens, Renaults and Peugeots. Signs in French hung outside the small shops. Frame houses, painted in pastel colors with blue enamel number plates, lined the narrow streets. But for the New England appearance of the houses that climbed barren hills, it might have been some small town on the coast of Brittany.

The French spoken on the islands bears the soft accent of Brittany and, despite a profusion of nautical slang, it was not hard to understand. Canadian students come to St. Pierre and Miquelon to learn French with local families, which may explain why the residents seem so patient with visitors who speak their language poorly.

We were spared language shock by our hotel’s owner, Jean Pierre Andrieux, who greeted us on the quay in flawless English. Born of French parents, he grew up on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, and is also the Canadian honorary consul, head of the tourist office, local historian and a connoisseur of bargain wines, which he acquires for his guests on annual forays to France.

The Hotel Robert, which had once served as a police barracks, overlooks the harbor, and our twin-bedded room was simple but comfortable with an American-style bathroom. Once we had settled in, Mr. Andrieux invited his new guests into the dining room for a glass of his favorite Bordeaux while he briefed us about the islands.

St. Pierre, Miquelon and Langlade altogether cover 93 square miles, about half the size of Martha’s Vineyard. Ninety percent of the inhabitants live on St. Pierre, which is smallest but has the best harbor. The French Government pours millions of dollars a year into the islands, and not purely for national pride. It also wants to assert its right to fishing grounds and potential oil deposits off the Canadian coast.

The heyday of the islands came in the 1920’s after the United States ushered in Prohibition. St. Pierre and Miquelon, then still a French colony, readily became a transient stop for whisky and other liquor being smuggled into the United States. Before long, Mr. Andrieux explained, ”every basement in town was transformed into a liquor warehouse.” The local fish processing plant closed for lack of workers, and large concrete warehouses sprang up along the waterfront to serve American bootleggers like Bill McCoy, whose booze was good enough to become known as ”the real McCoy.” Under French law it was quite legal, and up to 300,000 cases of liquor a month were loaded into the fast rumrunners tied up alongside the docks.

Because whisky cases made too much noise when they were unloaded, the bottles were wrapped in straw and packed into jute sacks before leaving St. Pierre. The islanders used the leftover cases to fuel stoves and build houses. One red and white cottage on the outskirts of town is still known as the Cutty Sark Villa.

When the United States repealed Prohibition in 1933, the thriving island economy collapsed. The St. Pierrais, as the people here call themselves, held a mock funeral and went back to fishing. Today, some Newfoundlanders admit sailing across to St. Pierre and smuggling back a little liquor or wine to evade the stiff Canadian duties, but Mr. Andrieux disparaged this as ”peanuts” com-pared to the good old days. His hotel boasts the best collection of Prohibition-era artifacts and photographs in town, including a straw boater that Mr. Andrieux said Al Capone left behind.

The islands enjoyed a resurgence of attention in the dark days of World War II, when three Free French corvettes and a submarine captured St. Pierre from the Vichy Government. Not a shot was fired in the invasion. ”They just sailed in and tied up,” recalled Mireille Andrieux, the hotelier’s mother, who watched the sailors land from her window. ”There was no trouble. Some people clapped. A girl kissed the first sailor who came ashore and later married him.”

That evening we were introduced to the cuisine of St. Pierre. The islanders retain a French appreciation of food at considerable cost to their government. Most meat and vegetables are imported from Canada, but other products, including cheese and wine, come in from Le Havre via Nova Scotia, with Paris subsidizing the freight. The French Air Force even delivers fresh lettuce or endive on its trans-Atlantic training flights.

Dining out is so popular that reservations are needed for the better restaurants. ”It’s one of the few things that people can do nicely,” said Mr. Andrieux. ”They don’t go to eat. They go to have a good time.”

We first sampled Le Caveau, a cozy bistro with stucco walls, bright tablecloths and recorded French music. A plateful of the local smoked salmon ($6 in United States funds), eaten with crusty French bread, was strong and flavorful. Smoked salmon from St. Pierre is considered such a delicacy in Paris that the Elysee Palace imports it for banquets.

The islanders dismiss the fish caught offshore as ”poor man’s food,” but it is transformed in the preparation. We tried the excellent halibut baked in a light cream sauce and the baked cod (each about $6). For dessert we had vacherin ($2), a light pastry with pistachio ice cream folded into crisp layers of meringue, whipped cream and almonds.

On a subsequent evening, we were directed to Chez Dutin, a small dining room in the home of Madame Dutin, who at the age of 85 still cooks while her daughter serves. Dinner, including minestrone, coquille St.-Jacques, chicken simmered with mushrooms in a tomato sauce and a light lemon tart, cost under $10 with a glass of wine.

Chez Gegene, another recommended restaurant, looked drab from the outside but glowed inside with dainty candle lamps illuminating the brocade wallpaper. It was best known for steak pizzaiola, served in a spicy tomato-based sauce ($7), and, for dessert, mystere flambe ($3). This vanilla ice cream concoction with chocolate and nuts was set aflame with a Basque liqueur called Izarra.

We breakfasted nearly as well at the Hotel Robert, which dispensed unlimited chicory-flavored coffee and baskets of croissants or petits pains au chocolate just out of the oven of a nearby patisserie. These flaky buns with their core of dark chocolate were so good that I unwittingly consumed four the first morning.

Though life on St. Pierre seemed languid, it was not hard to find things to do. The uncluttered atmosphere is excellent for short-wave radio transmissions to faraway places. A ham operator from Connecticut takes the same room every year in the hotel annex. Mr. Andrieux obligingly installed a cable leading to an antenna on the roof.

Less single-minded tourists can walk around St. Pierre, lingering at sidewalk cafes in summer and taking in such modest sights as the Catholic stone church of St. Peter’s, with door handles in the shapes of fish, or the town museum on the third floor of an old stucco building. The museum is crammed with curiosities ranging from models of sailing ships to Breton wooden shoes, displays of nautical knots and a locally caught lobster nearly three feet long.

For $6 a person, they can ride a tour bus around the island and out to the westernmost end at Pointe de Savoyard, past summer cottages tucked into the scrub vegetation. ”People move one kilometer away for the summer,” our driver said. ”Quite a change, eh?”

Savoyard Pond is popular with windsurfers because it combines inland water with a stiff offshore Atlantic breeze. St. Pierre, which is only 10 square miles in size, can even be circumnavigated on a moped, which is rented in town for $4.50 an hour.

The Harbour

Shopping also became an adventure, because few French imports were visible in shop windows crammed with fishing tackle and nautical pumps. ”Nothing is advertised, so you have to ask,” Mr. Andrieux advised.

A candy shop sold flowers and a butcher shop stocked wine. An auto accessories store carried Le Creuset enameled iron skillets. French perfume, except for some brand names, cost about half the United States price. Parisian silk scarves were $14. The best bargains were French wines, some of which Mr. Andrieux sold in his hotel boutique. He encouraged guests to take them to the daily hotel buffet to save money. A 1984 Pouilly-Fume cost about $5.50 and a fancier 1983 Gevrey-Chambertin was about $18. With so few United

States tourists, local merchants do not distinguish between United States and Canadian dollars, so bargains vanish unless a visitor changes his money into French or Canadian currency.

After-dinner entertainment was as low-key, though a couple of discotheques cranked up about 11:30 P.M. and went until 4 A.M. One night I went to the Biarritz, which throbbed to recorded French and American rock music. By midnight the only other customers were a handful of Japanese sailors dancing with one another.

Visitors can attend weekly Basque folk dancing in a town square in the summer, stop by a local jai alai match or watch local fishermen haul ashore the day’s catch, which may end up in Halifax, Paris or Boston.

We walked along the rocky coast and combed the beach for driftwood, colorful stones and other surprises. The treacherous currents and fog have contributed to hundreds of shipwrecks off St. Pierre and Miquelon. For generations, the islanders augmented their meager earnings from fishing by salvaging the wreckage. Some farmers on Miquelon put out their cattle on the sand bars so that ships would think they were navigational buoys and run aground. In 1902, a sailing ship mistook one of St. Pierre’s church steeples for a lighthouse in the fog and wound up in the town cemetery.

There were inevitable tales of submerged treasure. In 1828, the crew of the Fulwood, a British ship, mutinied and murdered the captain. The ship was wrecked, and islanders today insist that the gold aboard has yet to be found.

St. Pierre is said to be the only place in North America where a criminal ever was executed by guillotine. Auguste Neel was beheaded in 1889 for murdering another fisherman in a drunken quarrel. The guillotine, which had to be fetched from Guadeloupe, remains locked up in the police station on St. Pierre, an old-timer explained, ”so no one will sell it to an American souvenir hunter.”

The View

A spirited rivalry lingers between St. Pierre and Miquelon, which was settled by French Acadians expelled from Canada for refusing to swear loyalty to the British King in the 18th century. A ferry runs between the islands, but we flew over on Air St. Pierre, a government-subsidized local airline. The 15-minute flight on a twin-engined aircraft cost about $12 round trip.

There was not much to see in Miquelon, a fishing village of 600 inhabitants with neat rows of weather-beaten frame houses. But there we hired a battered van for $36 to drive us across a slender sand isthmus to Langlade. ”If you hear a boom-boom, don’t worry. The shocks are kaput,” its unshaven driver, Alain Roverche, cheerfully advised.

Half-wild horses, the survivors of earlier shipwrecks, grazed on the grassy hillocks. We stopped to watch a colony of seals playing offshore. Some were curious enough to swim toward us for a look before diving into the heavy surf. From the sand protruded the hulk of a Newfoundland trawler grounded in 1954.

Sandpipers and other migratory birds foraged for shellfish in the tidal pools of the slender isthmus. Langlade itself looked like a wilder Cape Cod, down to the abundant cranberry and rose-hip bushes. Some residents of St. Pierre keep summer homes on Miquelon or go hunting on Langlade, where white-tailed deer brought over from Canada in the 1950’s have proliferated in the thick brush and stunted spruce forests. Other vacationers dive for lobsters, although scuba gear is not permitted.

Our last day in St. Pierre left barely enough time to take a dory that shuttled every half-hour to the Ile aux Marins, a largely deserted island at the mouth of the harbor. Derelict wooden houses clustered around a graying old church. In the tall grass of the hillside stood 14 metal crosses marking the graves of islanders killed in the First and Second World Wars. ”Mort Pour La France” read each inscription, affirming that the loyalty of Frenchmen had endured in this improbable corner of France’s last empire.

Surf’s up

Getting There The best time to visit the islands is during the warmer months, especially August and September. Summer temperatures average only 51 degrees, and even on sunny days a windbreaker or sweater comes in handy.

A visit to St. Pierre and Miquelon can be combined with a trip to Newfoundland or Nova Scotia. A ferry from Sydney, Nova Scotia takes you to Port aux Basques in southwestern Newfoundland, where you should allow at least a day to drive via Gander to Fortune. It is not possible to take your car to St. Pierre, which has only 22 miles of roads. For about $4.50, you can leave your car parked safely inside a fenced-in lot near the Fortune ferry office.