Anticosti Island


Anticosti is an island located between the Jacques Cartier and Honguedo Straits, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in L'Île-d'Anticosti, Minganie MRC, Côte-Nord, Quebec, Canada.

Toponymy

Anticosti has had several First Nations names: Natigôsteg, "advanced land" in Mi'kmaq; Natashquan, "where we catch bears”", in Innu.
In 1535, Jacques Cartier wrote: "the said island which we have named the island of Assumption", after having written Antiscoti and Antiscoty, Samuel de Champlain spelled the name of this island Enticosty and Antycosty. The name in French is Île d’Anticosti.

History

Indigenous history

For thousands of years, Anticosti Island was the territory of the indigenous peoples who lived on the mainland and used it as a hunting ground.
The Innu called it Notiskuan, translated as "where bears are hunted" and the Mi'kmaq called it Natigôsteg, meaning "forward land".

Colonisation and settlement

The French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed along its shore in the summer of 1534. He provided its first written description and named it Isle de l'Assomption, because he reached it on the Day of the Assumption of Mary. This name had fallen into disuse by 1656.
About 1586, the historian André Thevet wrote that "the savages named Naticousti", while Samuel de Champlain spelled it Antiscoti, Antiscoty, Enticosty and Antycosty.
From that time on, France had officially incorporated the island into its colonial empire.
The island's first European settlers arrived in 1680 when Louis XIV gave Louis Jolliet the Seigneury of the Mingan Archipelago and Anticosti Island as compensation for reconnoitring the Mississippi and Hudson Bay. Louis Jolliet erected a fort on Anticosti and in the spring of 1681 settled there with his wife, four children and six servants.
His fort was captured and occupied during the winter of 1690 by some of the Massachusetts troops of William Phips during their retreat after an unsuccessful attempt to capture Quebec City.
After Jolliet's death in 1700, the island was divided among his three sons and the Jolliet family retained ownership until 1763 when the island became part of British North America under the terms of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years' War.
That same year, the island was annexed to Newfoundland until 1774 when it was returned to Lower Canada and annexed again to Newfoundland from 1809 to 1825. It became a part of Quebec at the Canadian Confederation in 1867.
During these years the island property changed hands several times, its owners generally using it for the harvesting of timber; otherwise no real development took place. For example, the French Canadian Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau owned it among other seigneuries and made money from them.

Late 19th-century settlement

In 1874, it was bought by the Anticosti Island Company and they founded the villages at English Bay and Fox Bay. Most of the inhabitants, however, continued to be the few keepers of the island's many lighthouses. Because of the number of shipwrecks around the island, stores of provisions were also maintained around the island for sailors who might be washed ashore.
In 1882, the Parish of Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption was founded, a term referring to Cartier's name for the island. In 1884, the island became property of the Stockwell brothers who formed a forestry company two years later. But they were unsuccessful and the company lasted only five years.
By the 1890s, the fish and wildlife of the island had been almost eradicated through european overhunting.

Henri Menier and private ownership

In 1895, Anticosti was sold for $125,000 to French chocolate maker Henri Menier who also leased the shore fishing rights.
Menier named the island's high Vauréal Falls after the town of Vauréal in France where he owned a home. He constructed the entire village of Port-Menier, built a cannery for packing fish and lobsters, and attempted to develop its resources of lumber, peat and minerals. Many of the original houses still stand today.
Furthermore, he converted the island into a personal game preserve and introduced nonindigenous animals for this purpose, including a herd of 220 white-tailed deer. The deer thrived and today the population exceeds 160,000 while the island's moose population is about 1,000. It has been reported that black bears, which rely on berries to bulk on for the winter, had lived on the island until the introduction, but have disappeared perhaps because of the deer eating the berry bushes bare.

Ownership by forestry companies

Henri Menier died in 1913 and his brother Gaston became the owner of Anticosti Island. He used and maintained it for a time but eventually decided it was not an economically viable operation and sold it to the Wayagamack Pulp and Paper Company in 1926 for $6,000,000.
For the next five decades, the island was used almost exclusively by forestry companies which harvested timber and built some infrastructure, mainly roads, but abandoned the villages at English Bay and Fox Bay.

1930s sale controversy

Wayagamack's timber production was successful until the Great Depression when the paper market collapsed. The island property was taken over by Consolidated Paper Corporation Limited in 1931, but they showed little interest in it and put it up for sale. Offers came from Canadian, American, British, French and Belgian parties. In July 1937, an offer was received from a consortium of Dutch and German capitalists who intended to build a sulphite mill and wanted a steady supply of pulpwood and access to Canadian capital.
In the autumn of that year, a team of German surveyors travelled to the island to examine its timber and export potential. When this story broke in the Montreal Gazette of 2 December 1937, it caused an immediate controversy since the story claimed that the survey team was really made up of Adolf Hitler's agents and that most were naval, military and fortifications experts.
Despite the substantial offer, the promise of thousands of new jobs, and the fact that there were no legal methods to block the sale, the suspicions remained. A committee was set up to investigate the affair but concluded that "there was no evidence to indicate that the project has other than a commercial purpose". However, when the deadline to purchase the island passed on 15 September 1938, the offer expired and controversy died out.

Government ownership and management

In 1974, the government of Quebec purchased the island from the forestry company Consolidated Bathurst Ltd. for $23,780,000. Anticosti was placed under management by the Ministry of Recreation, Hunting and Fishing and in 1983 the process began to set up a working municipal structure. Today, about 60% is under management by Sépaq and since April 2001, has been designated as a national conservation park. With its 24 rivers and streams bountiful with salmon and trout, the island is now a tourist destination for anglers and hunters, particularly from the United States and Canada, as well as for paleontologists, bird watchers and hikers.

Geography

Anticosti Island is located in the Gulf of St. Lawrence at the edge of St. Lawrence River estuary. At in size, the island has a length of 222 km and a maximum width of 56 km, its highest peak rises to 306 m.
It is the 90th largest island in the world and 20th largest island in Canada. Anticosti Island is separated on the north from the Côte-Nord region of Quebec by the Jacques Cartier Strait, and on the south from the Gaspé Peninsula by the Honguedo Strait.
Anticosti Island is larger than Prince Edward Island but sparsely populated, with most of the permanent population in the village of Port-Menier on the western tip of the island; this population once consisted chiefly of the keepers of the lighthouses erected by the Canadian government. The entire island constitutes one municipality known as L'Île-d'Anticosti.
Due to more than 400 shipwrecks off its coasts, Anticosti Island is sometimes called the "Cemetery of the Gulf".
Anticosti Island is part of the eastern St. Lawrence lowlands. It is long and has a maximum breadth of — times as large as the province of Prince Edward Island. Its coastline is long, and is rocky and dangerous, offering little shelter for ships except in Gamache, Ellis, and Fox Bays. There are large shoals to the south.
The largest lake on the island is Lake Wickenden, which feeds the Jupiter River. There are numerous rivers on Anticosti, many of which flow through deep gorges and canyons to the north and south shores.
Topographically, Anticosti Island can be divided into three distinct regions: two lowland areas, rarely exceeding in elevation, in the eastern and western thirds of the island linked along the coast; and a central highland forming a plateau that rises to just over. This plateau is an unidirectional structure slightly tilted to the south, and is characterized by rolling cuestas. The rocks exposed on the island form a continuous sedimentary stratum more than thick. These are the most complete strata in eastern North America of the Ordovician and Silurian periods.
The main rivers are:
South shore of Anticosti Island :
North shore of Anticosti Island :
  • Huile River
  • Patate River
  • Observation River
  • Vauréal River
  • Des Petits Jardins River
  • Rivière de l'Ours
  • Natiscotec River
  • Métallique River
  • Rivière aux Saumons
  • Schmitt River
  • Prinsta River
  • Renard River