Birds are in such flocks off Funk Island that the men
go ashore to hunt, as the fisher folk anchor for bird shooting to-day.

Higher rises the rocky sky line; barer the shore wall, with never a break
to the eye till you turn some jagged peak and come on one of those snug
coves where the white fisher hamlets now nestle. Reefs white as lace
fret line the coast. Lonely as death, bare as a block of marble, Gull
Island is passed where another crew in later years perish as castaways.
Gray finback whales flounder in schools. The lazy humpbacks lounge round
and round the ships, eyeing the keels curiously. A polar bear is seen on
an ice pan. Then the ships come to those lonely harbors north of
Newfoundland--Griguet and Quirpon and Ha-Ha-Bay, rock girt, treeless,
always windy, desolate, with an eternal moaning of the tide over the
fretful reefs.

[Illustration: WHERE THE FISHER HAMLETS NOW NESTLE, NEWFOUNDLAND]

{10} To the north, off a little seaward, is Belle Isle. Here, storm or
calm, the ocean tide beats with fury unceasing and weird reechoing of
baffled waters like the scream of lost souls. It was sunset when I was
on a coastal ship once that anchored off Belle Isle, and I realized how
natural it must have been for Cartier's superstitious sailors to mistake
the moan of the sea for wild cries of distress, and the smoke of the
spray for fires of the inferno. To French sailors Belle Isle became Isle
of Demons. In the half light of fog or night, as the wave wash rises and
falls, you can almost see white arms clutching the rock.

As usual, bad weather caught the ships in Belle Isle Straits. Till the
9th of June brown fog held Cartier. When it lifted the tide had borne
his ships across the straits to Labrador at Castle Island, Chateau Bay.
Labrador was a ruder region than Newfoundland. Far as eye could scan
were only domed rocks like petrified billows, dank valleys moss-grown and
scrubby, hillsides bare as slate; "This land should not be called earth,"
remarked Cartier. "It is flint! Faith, I think this is the region God
gave Cain!" If this were Cain's realm, his descendants were "men of
might"; for when the Montaignais, tall and straight as mast poles, came
down to the straits, Cartier's little scrub sailors thought them giants.
Promptly Cartier planted the cross and took possession of Labrador for
France. As the boats coasted westward the shore rock turned to
sand,--huge banks and drifts and hillocks of white