The celebration this year of the 400^th Anniversary of Jacques Cartier's discovery of Canada has drawn the attention of the whole Dominion to that great Peninsula of wildly lovely hills and valleys which juts out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence as the Eastern extremity of the part of Quebec lying South of the Great River, and is still known by its Micmac (Indian) name of Gaspe, which means Land's End. For here, as we know from the great explorer's own journal, he made his first landing on the spot where Gaspe Village now stands, and took possession of the country in the name of the King of France. But six years ago when I caught my first glimpse of this delectable land, the Perrault Boulevard around the peninsula had not yet been completed; and even the name of Gaspe was scarcely known west of Quebec.

It was at a luncheon which Leon Garneau, K.C., gave in my honour at the Montreal Reform Club, with six other past-presidents of this great Liberal Club as fellow guests, that Senator Casgrain first gave me the idea that Gaspe Peninsula was a good place for canoeing. And it was B.J. Kaine of the Marine and Fisheries Department in Quebec, whose tours of inspection made him familiar with every bit of that beautiful coast, who directed me to Gaspe Village and the Hotel Morin as a good starting point. To all of them I owe a debt of delight, I can never repay. I dare not start to rhapsodize on the joys of canoeing, or I would never get underway with my story. But to me it is the great Canadian Sport.

I regard with pity poor chaps who are content to chase a pill around a pasture, and think it the greatest sport in the world. And of all the places I know for enjoying a canoe, Gaspe stands in a class by itself. I still remember my first summer there as a dream of delight. For I acted with promptness on the genial Senator's suggestion, and that very day took the Clark Steamship Company's staunch little steamer Gaspesia from Montreal. And in order to lose no time after I arrived, I got my canoe, a cedar-strip Peterboro cruiser with torpedo bow, up on the boat deck soon after we left port. And there, where I missed none of the splendid scenery, First Officer Fraser not only showed me how to take off the accumulation of many coats of varnish, but himself worked on it with me, so that it was bright and shiny with its new coat by the time we reached Gaspe Village.

Here I found comfortable and spotlessly clean quarters and excellent fare at the Hotel Morin, where I could lie in bed and watch an osprey hovering over a fish-trap nearby, and great three-masted and four-masted oceangoing sailing vessels coming up the Basin. At first it looked as if the difficulty of getting in and out of my canoe from the high wharves, made it necessary by the tides, was going to be a serious one. But Mr. Wilton Guignon, a kindly hardware merchant, not only allowed me to use his boathouse but borrowed a raft from Baker's Hotel to make me a floating dock. Mr. Wilton Guignon's house boat at Gaspe where the author kept his canoe, 'Sea Fox', the only craft in 'King George's Navy.'

I shall never forget the sheer delight of those early mornings of Gaspe Basin. As I stepped into my canoe from its low floating dock, starfish of assorted sizes were to be seen clinging to the face of the boathouse cribbing, and here and there a jellyfish, looking like a red anemone in the bottom of an inverted glass bowl, propelled itself gently along by expanding and contracting the lips of the bowl. At that hour the waters of the great landlocked harbour lay in unawakened calm. And as soon as I was clear of the wharves, the sandy shoal of St. George's Cove spread a garden of seaweed of various shapes and shades beneath my smoothly slipping paddle.

To my left the pine clad bank of Jacques Cartier Point poured forth a flood of melody while Song sparrow, Vesper Sparrow and Whitethroat sang matins with me as on m

¹ We cannot determine with any degree of certainty whether or not this is an article that Calvin had intended to publish or a speech/address given.

² As there was no date on the original document, this is the date we have assigned to it.