Anticosti Island (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃tikɔsti]) is a large but sparsely populated island belonging to the Canadian province of Quebec. It lies in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and is separated from mainland Quebec by the Jacques Cartier and Honguedo straits. Administratively, it forms a municipality of the Côte-Nord region.
Toponymy
The name Anticosti first appeared in the writings of Samuel de Champlain in 1603, as Anticosty. It apparently represents a corruption of the earlier Nadicousti, recorded by André Thevet in 1586 and described by him as the Amerindian name for the island (the European name, bestowed by Jacques Cartier in 1535, being Isle de l'Assumption). Its origin and meaning are unclear, though William Francis Ganong speculatively ascribed it to the St. Lawrence Iroquoian language.
The Montagnais name for the island is Notiskuan, meaning "where bears are hunted", while the Micmac name is Natigôsteg, meaning "forward land".
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.
Colonisation and settlement
The French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed along its shore in the summer of 1534. 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 (as Lower Canada came to be called) 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 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.
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 (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.
Geography
Anticosti Island is located in the Gulf of St. Lawrence at the edge of St. Lawrence River estuary. At 7,943 km2 (3,067 sq mi) 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 (the Labrador Peninsula) 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 (218 people in 2016), 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 222 km (138 mi) long and has a maximum breadth of 56 km (35 mi) — 1+1⁄2 times as large as the province of Prince Edward Island. Its coastline is 520 km (320 mi) 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 150 metres (490 ft) 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 300 m (980 ft). This plateau is a 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 2,000 m (6,600 ft) 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 (from west to east):
North shore of Anticosti Island (from west to east):
Climate
Anticosti Island has a subarctic climate (Köppen Dfc), affected by the maritime influence of the Gulf of St. Lawrence which reduces seasonal temperature variation. The average annual temperature is 2.0 °C (35.6 °F). The month of July is the warmest with an average temperature of 15.3 °C or 59.5 °F. Conversely, February is the coldest month, averaging −10.9 °C or 12.4 °F. Snowfall is abundant, usually accumulating over 3 metres or 120 inches in the western and central parts.
Flora and fauna
Flora
Every summer from 1924 to 1928, Brothers of the Christian Schools Marie-Victorin and Rolland-Germain explored the Anticosti-Minganie. The two botanists made many discoveries, including Senecio pseudo-arnica var. rollandii or Senecio rollandii as well as the Mingan thistle Cirsium minganense and Botrychium minganense. The botanists explored the coasts of Anticosti Island aboard a refurbished old fishing vessel, the Virginia.
The archives of the University of Montreal present on Flickr: Anticosti, a land of immense spaces, the sea all around and a social world of the 1920s gone forever, series of photos by Marie-Victorin: Brother Kirouac (1885-1944).
In 2004, the island's vascular flora was estimated at 700 species. Rare Plants of the Mingan Archipelago, Parks Canada 2023, said that nearly a tenth of Anticosti Island's flora are rare plants, most of which colonize open habitats associated with rivers (cliffs, taluses or pebbled surfaces) and mineral bogs. Anticosti Island is home to the rare orchid, Cypripedium arietinum Ait. f. (Cypripède tête-de-bélier; ram's head lady's slipper). While populations are declining elsewhere in eastern North America, the orchid flourishes here abundantly, making Anticosti a refuge for this plant.
The forests of Anticosti Island are typical boreal forest, with common species such as white spruce, balsam fir, and black spruce. It is distinguished by some minor stands of American white birch and trembling aspen.
Picea glauca (Moench) Voss (Épicéa glauque, Épinette blanche; white spruce).
Abies balsamea (Linné) Miller (Sapin baumier, Sapin; balsam fir).
Picea mariana (Miller) BSP (Épicéa marial, Épinette noire; black spruce).
Betula papyrifera Marshall (Bouleau à papier, Bouleau blanc, Bouleau à canot; canoë birch, American white birch).
Populus tremuloides Michaux (Peuplier faux-tremble, Tremble; aspen).
Balsam fir is slowly being replaced with white spruce because of intensive grazing done by white-tailed deer and by periodic outbreaks of hemlock looper and spruce budworm. About a quarter of the island is covered by peat lands.
Fauna
In Anticosti Island, the wildlife is characteristic of an isolated marine environment. Of the 24 mammal species, 14 or 15 of these are marine mammals, including seals:
Halichoerus grypus (Phoque gris; grey seal).
Phoca vitulina (Phoque commun; harbour seal).