Anticosti Island

Anticosti Island, seen in the middle of the Gulf of St Lawrence, is slightly smaller than Puerto Rico.

Anticosti Island is a large, but largely unpopulated island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It is currently part of the Province of Quebec, although, at times, it was part of Newfoundland. The island is slightly smaller than Puerto Rico and Jamaica, and larger than nearby Prince Edward Island.

The shoals surrounding the Island have represented serious navigational dangers, and its coast is lined with lighthouses.

History

First Nations visits

There is no record of permanent settlement by First Nations peoples. However it is believed that both the Micmac, to the south, and the Innu, to the north, were aware of the island, and would visit it, for hunting.

Discovery by John Cabot, 1535

Explorer John Cabot was the first to sight the island, in 1535, but he did not realize it was an island.

Jolliet

The French King gave the explorer Louis Jolliet the seigneurship of the island in 1680 as a reward for discovering the Mississippi. He made limited efforts to exploit his gift, directing the creation of a farm, and a fishery, but they were burnt, in 1690, when France and Great Britain went to war.

1881 famine

The failure of the local fishery, in 1881, resulted in a local famine, that required aid from the Government of Quebec.

Ownership by the Menier family

Henri Menier, a citizen of France, bought the Island, in 1895, for $125,000, with ambitious development plans. Port Menier, a community of approximately 200 individuals, and the island's only remaining settlement, is named after him.

the New York Times reported Menier built new port facilities, lumber mills, canneries, a fleet of support vessels, and a railroad. They also reported "The Quebec Government gave him cordial support in ejecting the undesirables who had squatted on the island..." Menier, they said, recruited "law-abiding and thrifty French Canadian families" as his new settlers. In its obituary of him, in 1913, the New York Times reported Menier's careful selection of settlers had meant there had been no crime, on the island, and thus no need for Police.

The island had relatively few species of mammals native to it. Menier, in an attempt to turn the island into a destination for hunters, tried to introduce to it species hunters targetted. His attempts to introduce some species, like American Bison were not successful. His introduction of whitetail deer, from the mainland, was so successful that, in 1941, the deer population was estimated at 100,000. In 1958 one reporter described how deer were so plentiful hunters could confidently wait to shoot the largest bucks, and ignore does and less mature males. In 2011 the deer population was estimated to be 166,000.

Menier's brother Gaston inherited the Island, and sold it, in July 1926, for $6 million dollars, to the Wayagamac Pulp and Paper company.

Logging operations, 1926-1938, and the German ownership bid

By 1938 Consolidated Paper owned the island. They said they had shut down all logging operations in 1929, and had kept paying staff on the island for the past nine years. According to the New York Times, they claimed $1.5 million would be required "to rehabilitate equipment and install new machinery", before they would be able to recommence logging operations.

A consortium of German companies, backed by the German government, initiated purchase negotiations with Consolidated, in late 1937. The proposed purchase triggered opposition, and the Quebec government barred the sale, and the export of forest products, from the island.

Consolidated claimed it had never occurred to them that a sale to German companies, of an island near a key shipping lane, could put Canada's national security at risk.

Purchase by the Government of Quebec

The Government of Quebec purchased the island in 1974. Since then it has coordinated some efforts to further develop tourism to the still quite inaccessible island. Those tourism efforts have been largely aimed at sports hunters and sports fishers.

Geography

The island's tallest peak is approximately 1000 foot (304.8 m) tall. The island's peaks are part of the Appalachian Mountain chain.

Deer overpopulation

Of the species introduced by Menier the whitetailed deer proved the most problematic. He had 120 deer introduced. Without predators the deer extirpated the island's Balsam Fir by the 1930s - when, prior to the deer introduction, it had been the most common species of trees. One of the few original species of mammal native to the island had been black bear. The black bear had relied heavily on native berries, and could not compete with the hungry deer population. The last bear was seen on the island in the 1970s. There are so many deer tourists are told that it is not safe to drink from the island's pristine looking streams, because those waters are likely polluted with deer feces.

According to Denis Duteau, a deer biologist, in 2011, visiting sports hunters culled approximately 10,000 deer, per year. He asserted that this is about a third the number that die each winter, and not nearly enough to bring the deer population under control.

Petroleum reserves

The new, controversial, technique known as "fracking" opened up the possibility of exploiting natural gas and shale oil from sedimentary rocks under and around the island. In 2015 Quebec Premier Pauline Marois signed deals with oil companies, like Petrolia Incorporated, to drill exploratory wells, and use fracking to measure how much oil and gas could be extracted.

The fracking would use water from the island's river and streams, add a proprietary and secret cocktail of chemicals, which would then be injected deep into the bedrock, at high pressure. Petrolia promised to purify the effluent of their toxic chemicals, through an undisclosed process, before releasing it into the Gulf.

Fishing for Salmon in those streams is a key component of the current economy, and experts predicted stripping those rivers of large volumes of water fracking would require would have a strong negative impact on the Salmon fishery.

When Marois's Parti Quebecois lost power new Premier Philippe Couillard claimed he was bound by the previous government's agreements. But in 2017 he issued an order barring drilling on Anticosti, and agreed to pay $41 million to the petroleum companies with signed deals.