We wound up our Newfoundland cruise with St. George’s Bay, the last on the French Shore, and the only point at which any difficulty was raised about the exercise of our rights.  We there found, in fact, a large fast-growing and increasingly prosperous Anglo-Canadian village, and in the presence of its inhabitants we went through the ceremony of formally forbidding them to fish, which ceremony was greeted by protests both amicable and bantering.  Amicable, because half the population were French Canadians, talking our own language with a strong St. Malo accent, and in spite of everything else, the similarity of origin, language, religion, and habits, established friendly relations between us and them.  Bantering, because first of all our fishermen no longer frequented St. George, and secondly, because the prohibition, which was compulsory during the four or five days in the year during which our warships were present, became simply a dead letter during the other three hundred and six days of the year.  It was easy, of course, to see that our exclusive right to fish could not be maintained when once a sufficient indigenous population had settled there, but it was no less easy to judge that some local arrangement concerning these exceptional places, conciliating every interest, might easily be made.  Would that be possible nowadays, when electioneering palaver has embittered the whole business?  After leaving St. George, we spent a long time hunting for our colony of St. Pierre Miquelon in continuous fogs, and only succeeded in finding it by means of a plan of my own invention.  The weather happening to be moderate, I had several triangular soundings made while we were under sail, and then endeavoured to make the mathematical triangle thus obtained tally as to depth and nature of bottom with Captain Lavaud’s chart of the Newfoundland soundings.  So excellent is the chart in question, that the plan was successful, and gave us bearings by which we got a direct line for the shore.  St. Pierre Miquelon is a bare, wild, hideous islet, but with a first-class port.  Admirable as a victualling station and mart for our fishermen, its military value as far as our trade is concerned is absolutely nil.  Whatever may be done for it, it will always be at the mercy of whoever is master of the seas in time of war.

At Halifax, whither I went to meet the officer commanding the British naval station, we were put into quarantine on account of three convalescents, relics of the epidemic we had been suffering from.  But it was taken off, thanks to the generous intervention of the Governor-General of Nova Scotia, Lord Falkland, a splendid-looking man, well known in Parisian society.  Nobody could have been more obliging nor kinder than this “grand seigneur” and his wife, the daughter of William IV., were to us.