My World of Islands Read online

  Salisbury

  December 1992

  NORTH AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

  Saint-Pierre et Miquelon

  The Last Outpost

  Look stranger on this island now . . .

  W. H. AUDEN

  The little isles of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon lie under the great bulk of Newfoundland. They are often foggy, often cold. They are all that remains of the once widespread possessions of France in North America, territories that included vast areas of Canada and the state of Louisiana.

  It is not easy to reach them and the prospective traveller can count on little encouragement. At the Olympia Travel Exhibition in London, I went to the big and ambitious exhibit offered by the French and said to an official, ‘I would like to visit Saint-Pierre et Miquelon.’

  ‘Monsieur,’ he replied dismissively blowing out his cheeks as they do. ‘You are the only one.’

  There is a story that gives more evidence of the French vagueness as to their outpost in the New World: in 1914 some of the North Atlantic fishermen from Saint-Pierre et Miquelon went to their mother country to become soldiers and found themselves in an ‘acclimatisation’ depot along with troops from Equatorial Africa. This is something on a par with the Mediterranean island of Corfu being placed under the authority of Japan because someone at the League of Nations thought it sounded Oriental. Diplomats often have only a tenuous grasp of geography.

  I knew about Saint-Pierre et Miquelon when I was eleven years old because the islands issued one of the sets of beautiful stamps that came from all the colonies and territories of Free France, following the occupation of the home country by the Germans in 1940. This particular issue was a little delayed because, at the time of the surrender, the Governor decided he must obey orders and declared for the Vichy regime, under the thumb of the invaders. When America came into the war in 1941, it joined Canada in voicing disquiet about the presence of what was virtually an ‘enemy’ outpost, with a powerful radio transmitter, at the mouth of the Gulf of St Lawrence, broadcasting propaganda and noting shipping movements.

  So the US and Canada decided to invade the nuisance islands. Before they could do so, however, four Free French warships sailed in and did the job first. Cordell Hull, the American Secretary of State, was furious and threatened to send in his forces anyway. It could have come to a battle between allies but the United States fortunately held off. Most people in the islands are convinced that if de Gaulle’s ships had not arrived first, then today they would be a Canadian province or an American colony. As it is, they remain stubbornly and patriotically French; the tricolour flies over Place General de Gaulle, the language is as spoken in the home country – not to be confused with French Canadian – the cooking is French and you pay for it in francs.

  Getting to Saint-Pierre et Miquelon is not, as I have said, easy. People travelling from France, who have the most reason for wanting to go there, must fly from Paris to Montreal, a seven-hour journey, and then retrace their flight for four hours on a slow and frequently bouncing propeller-driven aeroplane. From London (where the Air Canada check-in clerk admitted she had never booked anyone to Saint-Pierre) I went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, via St John’s, Newfoundland, and then flew back one and three quarter hours in the same propeller plane. Since the islands are only fifteen kilometres off the south-western coast of Newfoundland, you might choose to fly to St John’s and then take a four-hour bus journey to the village of Fortune from which there is a ferry which takes an hour; but this route is available only in summer and at the discretion of the weather.

  At Halifax Airport I checked in with a big, bald and beaming gentleman called Sam, who appears to be Air Saint-Pierre. He later turned up at the gate at the other extreme of the airport to collect the boarding pass he had previously given me and to usher passengers to the plane. One or two needed just that – ushering. I had noticed them staring with disquiet at the little aircraft with its twin motors standing not just alone but isolated, far out, rather forlorn, on the apron, while the big cossetted jetliners nuzzled against the terminal buildings.

  We had to troop out towards it, thirty of us. On board we were given a paper bag with a bun in it. Sam appeared to be eyeing the propellers but, somewhat to my relief, he was not required to swing them. They each gave a cough, like a couple of old gentlemen clearing their throats, and then spun sturdily. They took a while to warm up. My fellow passengers kept looking out of the windows, as though to ensure they were still spinning. The only pair who seemed indifferent were a baby and a dog.

  Eventually, Air Saint-Pierre strutted onto the runway and, with all the shining jets having their faces turned away, sprinted down it and up into the blue Nova Scotia sky as fine as any of them. All my fellow travellers seemed to be French-speaking. Some had that unmistakably glad, smug look of people going home.

  One thing about our aeroplane – it did not fly so far aloft that you could not see anything. It pondered along the back of Nova Scotia (which was called Arcadia by the French; the people are still known as Arcadians). It was summer and the landscape below was full of glinting holes, big lakes, collared by pine trees. There were roads and lesser roads but few habitations. We crossed the narrow strait to Cape Breton Island, the coast indented, carved and curved, as though by someone gone mad with a fretsaw. It was one colour, a light fawn. In winter it is white from top to toe.

  We droned across the Newfoundland Gulf, today purple and lightly furrowed, one of the world’s most dangerous seas. You could tell when Miquelon Island was coming into view because the French people going home began to press breathlessly against the small windows, eager for the first sight of their home. We passed along the flanks of Langlade, the lower half of Miquelon, once a separate island now joined by a seven-mile dune. It looked, as it is, wild and unpeopled, moors and valleys rimmed by heavy cliffs.

  At one time there were people living there, surviving by farming and wrecking. Sometimes they combined the agrarian and the aggressive by hanging lanterns on the horns of cows and luring captains to the rocks. There were so many disasters along this coast, accidental and by design, that the wreckage piled up in the narrow strait and, joined by sand and shingle, formed the seven-mile dune that today joins the island to Miquelon proper.

  Air Saint-Pierre – the plane is its sole aircraft – banked in the summer sun and came in across its home island, the smaller of the two but the most populated and important. Now the passengers were almost squeaking in anticipation. The puzzled baby was held up so that it could get a good view.

  It is a little hump of a place, dotted with bright houses at random across its terrain but built thickly around its fine harbour, for so long the reason for its prosperous existence; a virtually ice-free anchorage in the middle of a cold sea. But other factors have intervened; the great days of Saint-Pierre as a fishing port are gone, probably forever.

  ‘Today’, said the taxi driver with a Gallic shrug, ‘there is only a little fishing. Seven boats. Three here, two at Miquelon, and two gone to Brittany for refit.’ His arm swept the almost empty harbour. ‘Once, monsieur, you would see fishing boats all across this water, French, Spanish, Portuguese, many, many. But now – look, what do you see?’

  Two-hundred-mile limits and stringent fish quotas, after years of over-fishing on the once bountiful Newfoundland Banks, are to blame. The town appeared as vacant as the harbour, its tidy buildings, its vivid and variously coloured wooden houses, like some film set when the actors have left. There were shops and French-looking cafés, and some cars, but emptiness echoed about the streets.

  ‘Fishing, yes, this was a great place,’ agreed Jean-Pierre Andrieux who, with his charming mother Mireille, runs the Hôtel Robert. ‘But, monsieur, the heyday of Saint-Pierre was the time of Prohibition in the United States. The bootleggers stayed in this very hotel. Indeed, you will be staying in one of these rooms. We call it the Al Capone Suite.’

  I stood at the window, as Al Capone must have done in the 1920s, although the rooms have been
altered since his day (he did not have an ensuite bath). Smoking his gangster’s cheroot he could survey the docks and the piers and witness all the prosperity he had brought to this small place.

  Monsieur Andrieux has assembled a neat museum in the bar and it includes a wonderful photograph of a 1920s bootlegger, heavily cigared, surrounded by laughing gangsters’ molls in bonnets and flappers’ skirts. Another photograph is signed with a flourish, ‘W. McCoy’. He was the man who guaranteed that his smuggled hooch was not watered down – and who, according to the islanders, gave the expression ‘The Real McCoy’ to the language.

  It was McCoy who discovered Saint-Pierre for the bootleggers. A meeting with an islander in a hotel in Halifax gave birth to a scheme to counter the restraints that the Canadian government was putting on the export of spirits. The authorities naturally refused to countenance obvious smuggling across its border with the United States, but it was quite happy to export any amount of liquor to a Prohibition-free foreign territory – and Saint-Pierre et Miquelon were conveniently French!

  Before long 350,000 cases of scotch, gin and other forbidden bottles were being freighted every month to the harbour at Saint-Pierre. The town boomed, fishermen left their nets and helped to unload the cargoes and then to ferry them down by night to the creeks and harbours of New England. The wooden crates, however, were both heavy and noisy. Sometimes the Customs men lying in dark wait were alerted. So a new industry grew in Saint-Pierre – the bottles being wrapped in straw jackets and transferred to jute sacks. And yet another industry rose from that. Three hundred and fifty thousand crates is a lot of wood. At first it was used as fuel for the island’s fires, but then someone realised it would make walls for houses. Even today, many of the island houses have some walls made from cases bearing the names of the great distilleries. One that is made entirely of whisky crates is called ‘Cutty Sark Villa’.

  Most of the inhabitants of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon originate from Brittany, Normandy and the French Basque region. There are some Arcadians, dispossessed by one of the frequent changes of ownership in Nova Scotia, settled in the one village of Miquelon, lying along a curved strand in the north-east corner of the larger and wilder island. In winter when the snow and ice and fog come upon the coasts it must be a very lonely place indeed. There is a boat which connects it to Saint-Pierre several times a week, an hour’s voyage – weather permitting. There is also an occasional plane service. But, in winter, Miquelon must be one of the world’s more solitary communities. Nevertheless, in true French fashion, there are several restaurants, a few thoughtful bars and a lonely café which advertises ‘Dancings’.

  This sense of isolation is not so much present in Saint-Pierre but that island also is often left to keep its own company in the six-month-long winter. The French Government has built an indoor sports complex, a community centre any urban place would enjoy, and a shopping complex, set between the sea and the cemetery. But the problems remain. There are half a dozen restaurants which try doggedly to keep up the French tradition, but almost every morsel of food has to be brought in. Fresh green vegetables are virtually a luxury. Almost the only reasonable growing-land in the island is soil brought from France as ballast in the ships of long ago.

  One crêperie, making the traditional envelope-like galette of Brittany, attracts occasional tourist customers by offering ‘Cheeseburger Galette’. But the wines are from France and sometimes someone will play the songs of the homeland on an accordion.

  Every summer Monday afternoon a Canadian cruise liner anchors off the port for four hours. Two hundred people come ashore and look in the shops, take photographs, and go on a forty-minute bus tour, which is about as long as the driver can make it. Madame Andrieux is busy in the wooden hotel’s shop, then the cruise passengers, mostly middle-aged, get around the tables of the bar, someone plays the piano and they sing and drink. ‘But,’ shrugs Madame Andrieux expressively, ‘at the end of the afternoon – poof! They are gone. And here we still are.’

  Difficult though it is to reach, some people do go to Saint-Pierre simply because it is a piece of true France. There is a college on the island for students from Canada and the United States who want to learn to speak the French they speak in France without actually going there. The tricolour flies over the prefecture in the Place General de Gaulle, as it does from many outlying cottages, which also display the flags of the islands, stretched out in the brisk wind. This incorporates the strange red, green, and blue ‘Union Jack’ of the Basques. The Governor of the islands is sent from France and serves a term of two years, as do the Prefect of Police and his thirty-six gendarmes, the hospital doctors and the schoolteachers. Most bring their families. Teenage children (thirty-seven per cent of the population is under twenty) are entitled to complete their education in France, at the government’s expense, and most do. Many never return.

  *

  In the Hôtel Robert is a remarkable photograph taken a century ago of a sailing ship wrecked against the graveyard on the Ile aux Marins, just outside the Saint-Pierre harbour. It is a scene, frozen like a still from an early film melodrama, stark and eerie. The stricken vessel sags against the rocks, its masts and torn sails hang above the tombstones. Figures stand helplessly in the wind, the beach is covered with snow.

  ‘It was Christmas Eve and her captain believed the light in the church tower, calling people to midnight mass, was the lighthouse,’ said Jean-Pierre Andrieux. ‘It was just one wreck of many. There have been 600 around these islands.’

  He keeps mementoes of such things and among the more curious items in the room were two Wurlitzer jukeboxes, circa 1970, and a small, motorised lawnmower. ‘Another wreck’, he said patting the chrome of the jukeboxes. ‘She was called the Transpacific, her radar had failed and the fog came down. Her master decided to make for the harbour here, but he missed it by a long way and the ship went onto the rocks, again on the Ile aux Marins, the Isle of Sailors. They tried to pull her off with tugs but it was no good. When she was declared a total loss, more than sixty local boats went out to claim the cargo.’

  He laughed wanly. ‘Not much of a cargo for them, 350 jukeboxes.’ He gave the lawnmower a touch. ‘And 250 of these – in a place with scarcely a few blades of grass to its name.’

  There are still useless jukeboxes in the corners of some living-rooms in Saint-Pierre. I asked Jean-Pierre what had happened to the motor mowers. ‘They were adapted,’ he smiled. ‘The children used them as beach buggies.’

  On the following day I went out to the Ile aux Marins. The small isle lies low against the near horizon, its roofs and the sturdy tower of its church standing like cut-outs against the sky. The rubber boat (the normal ferry was ‘broken’) passed below the muzzles of the four ponderous guns placed at the port entrance by the French many years ago to ward off the British, who never arrived. The channel was brief and flat on a summer afternoon of breezy sunlight. On the isle the houses, wooden and in many colours, glowed, the shingle sounded under my feet.

  But now there are no people permanently living there. Many of the houses have been restored by people from Saint-Pierre as holiday and weekend homes. (Some families have taken over former fishermen’s cottages on the main island itself, moving only a matter of a mile or so from their homes for vacations.) The Ile aux Marins was alive with wild flowers, there were mosses and marigolds beside little streams, the compensations of a short summer. I walked across the hummocky grass and down to the rocks, shells and sand on the far side of the island. Out there, lying like a big rusty axehead on the beach, was the stern of the jukebox-and-lawnmower-carrying Transpacific.

  While I was on the island I heard another story about her. Apparently when the tug boats had failed to pull her off the rocks and the insurance men had done their sums, the sad skipper decided to invite the captains and the accountants, together with the leaders of the Saint-Pierre community and his own officers, to a final meal on board. The best silver and napery was brought out, the good glasses polished, and the table
set. The choicest wines and the best food was served and the last dinner went on long into the night before the sorrowful skipper and his guests went ashore for the last time.

  In these latitudes, in summer, they have long evenings, often grey and rather eerie, which the Scots of the Shetlands and Orkneys call the ‘simmer dim’. It was almost uncanny walking along the harbour at that time, a lovely melancholy feeling, scarcely another soul about; the water creaked, the boats stood dumb, and there are few gulls in Saint-Pierre now that the fishing is virtually finished.

  I felt sad for the staunch little place. Lights shone from the new sports hall and there was muffled chatter from the windows of the tabled bar of the Hôtel Robert. In the last of the light three boys kicked a ball across the longest and widest stretch of grass for many miles – the Saint-Pierre football pitch.

  That day there had been talks in Quebec between France and Canada about increasing the fish quotas for the islands, but the inhabitants knew that it would not be enough. The fish was as likely to come back as Prohibition. With the short summer and the difficult journeys tourism is scarcely going to boom. France has made it staunchly plain that she intends to retain this, her last toe-hold in North America, and is willing to pay for it. Many of the islanders, fishermen, sailors, and their sons, believe that their future may be in the hands of the bankers, that they may become an offshore tax-haven and financial centre. The Grand Banks would take on a new meaning.

  The evening gathered late and by morning the fog had come down. From the window of the Hôtel Robert I could not see across the harbour to where the solitary aeroplane sat on the apron of the airport. She had flown in late the previous day. My taxi arrived. Madame Andrieux assured me that if the plane could not leave then the Al Capone suite would be mine for another night. The journey around the port was not encouraging. The driver shrugged and said ‘le brouillard’ might lift but then it might not. When we got to the airport, it was shut.