Anticosti Island - History

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".

The Skálholtsbók, written about 1420, recounts how Thorfinn Karlsefni on his voyage to Vinland "reached a fjord with an island near its mouth, where there were strong currents, and called the island Straumsey (Stream island). There were so many birds there that they could hardly walk without stepping on eggs. They sailed up into the fjord, which they called Straumsfjord" If Straumsfjord is identical with Saint Lawrence River, Straumsey could be the first reference to Anticosti Island in history.

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 discovered it on the Day of the Assumption of Mary. But 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 (1612), Antiscoty (1613), Enticosty (1625), and Antycosty (1632). From that time on, France had officially incorporated the island into its colonial empire.

Its first settlers arrived in 1680 when King Louis XIV gave Louis Jolliet the Seigneury of the Mingan Archipelago and Anticosti Island as compensation for exploring the Mississippi and Hudson Bay. Equal to one-quarter the size of Belgium, Anticosti thus became the largest island in the world ever to be privately owned. 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 the British Empire 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 permanently part of Lower Canada, or Quebec as it was now called, at 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.

In 1874, it was bought by the Anticosti Island Company and they founded the villages at English Bay and Fox Bay. 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.

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 70 m (230 ft) 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.

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 logging companies which invested nothing in environmental or heritage protection, while the villages at English Bay and Fox Bay were abandoned.

Wayagamack 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 fall 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 December 2, 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". When the deadline to purchase the island passed on September 15, 1938, the offer expired and controversy died out.

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 (ministère du Loisir de la Chasse et de la Pêche) 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, 572 km2 (221 sq mi) 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.

In June 2011, the Quebec firm Pétrolia claimed to have discovered about 30 billion barrels of oil on the island of Anticosti, which is the first time that significant reserves have been found in the province.