From the eastern coast of the island the Bette-Poule took her way to the western side, passing through the Straits of Belleisle, a narrow channel which parts Newfoundland from Labrador.  The amount of difficult navigation we met with going through the straits was really extraordinary.  The channel was full of ice-floes, either stranded or driven about by the currents.  A thick fog came down on us, with zenithal aurora borealis, the electric action of which threw out every compass, standard and otherwise, on board.  No seeing, no steering!  After having been in a very critical position at the entrance of Forteau Bay, a point on the Labrador coast celebrated for wrecks, I took the frigate into the haven of Ingornachoix, where we made some considerable stay, necessitated by the condition of my crew’s health.  For some time it had been suffering from the exceptional fatigues of the cruise.  During our stay in Le Croc, in spite of its being a breathing time, and of every kind of care, many men had been ailing, and the sickness ended by taking the form of a somewhat serious epidemic of smallpox.  The best thing we could do to stop the mischief and prevent it from increasing and becoming permanent (which would have resulted in closing almost all foreign ports to us) was to isolate the sick.  I therefore lost no time in having a hospital constructed on a pretty wooded isle, which lay just at the entrance to the place where we were anchored, and in it I settled all my sick men, doing everything in my power to dry and disinfect the frigate meanwhile.  This double measure was successful, and when we left the bay my crew was completely restored to health and vigour.

I learnt several things during this long period in harbour, the first of which was the discovery of the immense quantity of lobsters frequenting the coast.  The first day my men went to walk on shore they brought back nine hundred, which they had caught among the rocks, and that without the least difficulty.  I do not know whether the Ingornachoix lobster was like Bayard, without reproach, but without fear he most certainly was.  It was quite enough, when one caught sight of him in shallow water, to poke a stick at him.  He instantly sprang furiously forth, laid hold of it with his claws, and absolutely refused to let go.  This abundance of lobsters, turned to commercial account later, when it became known, gave rise to the Lobster Fisheries Question, one of the stalking-horses of the English Irredentists.  Furthermore, I discovered that since the codfish were becoming rare on the French Shore of the Straits of Belleisle, our fishermen, to remedy the scarcity, went over and poached on the English coast of Labrador—­the principal drawback to which contravention of the agreement was that it gave the English a pretext for doing the same thing.  As the English cruisers not unnaturally shut their eyes to irregularities which created precedents that might be harmful to us, our ships of war had