Message In A Molasses Barrel

In the winter of 1910 the isolated Iles de la Madeline’s undersea telegraph line –their only contact with the rest of Canada– was severed in a storm.

The people living on those islands were completely isolated and seemingly forgotten, running low on food and medical supplies in the cold winter weather, with no link to the mainland.

In a desperate effort to let the government know about their plight, they decided to send a message in a large empty wooden barrel that once held molasses, which in French is called a ponchon.

One cold February evening, as the sun was setting, the people of the islands gathered by the cold and icy sea, and watched their ponchon float away, carrying with it not only letters containing pleas for help, but also carrying their hopes and dreams to be reconnected to the mainland of Canada…

If you drew a straight line between Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, and another one from Cape Breton to the furthest eastern part of Labrador, the X where those two lines cross, way out in the middle of the St. Laurence, you will find the Iles de la Madeleine.

The islands themselves are an isolated, fog shrouded and wind swept archipelago consisting of seven inhabited islands, most of which are connected to one another by long sand dunes.

Today they are a popular tourist destination, boasting white sandy beaches that would rival PEI’s, Towering cliffs comparable to Fundy, a lobster fishing industry to rival Nova Scotia’s, and puffins, seals, and whales that could make Newfoundland jealous.

But, despite being geographically right smack in the middle of Atlantic Canada, politically speaking the Islands are actually a part of Quebec.

(Technically they are called –in English– the Magdalen Islands, and in Mi'kmawi'simk, the Mi'kmaq language, the islands are called Menagoesenog. But growing up in bilingual New Brunswick I’ve really only ever heard them called by their French name, which is Les Iles de la Madeleine, so I’m just going to go with the French for this article.)

Last Summer, I went camping on those islands with my girlfriend Monica. They are so isolated that it was a five hour long ferry trip to get there.

Even today, they remain at the mercy of the weather.

We actually ended up getting stuck on the Iles de la Madeleine because a massive wind storm swept in and battered the islands, which led to my ferry home being cancelled!

By 1910, when the ponchon story is taking place, the population of these islands were booming, and had exploded to some six thousand people.

This was all the more remarkable because humans only began to settle there a century before.

There was one main reason for the big population boom: lobster

This was a strange time for lobster, when Maritimers wouldn’t eat lobster themselves (unless they were super poor), but wealthy Americans had recently decided that lobster was a high end luxury meal to be served in the finest restaurants. This meant that Maritimers could suddenly make a lot of money off of selling them.

The people of the islands were from remarkably diverse backgrounds, which including Acadians, French from France, Scots, Irish, Americans, Canadians, and plenty of Maritimers hailing from PEI, Cape Breton and the North Shore.

It even included an astonishing number of people who did not want to ever be there, but whose ships had crashed on the dangerous waters around the islands, and they’d just washed up on the Iles de la Madeline and stayed there!

One of these people who stayed was Auguste LeBourdais, who was the master of a ship called The Wasp which was wrecked off of the islands in 1871. He was the sole survivor of the shipwreck and needed both of his legs amputated.

He was the operator of the island’s one and only telegraph line that connected the Iles de la Madeleine with Cape Breton, and from there to the rest of the world.

Built in 1882, the telegraph was a steel line under the sea which, to put it into modern terms, basically allowed texting.

Now the Madilinots kept up to date with news from all over the world. They sent messages to friends and families on the mainland. Merchants kept in close contact with suppliers.

Products and services were able to be ordered. Food, medicine, clothing, construction material, furniture, manufactured goods; supplies for work and fishing – everything you needed you’d just send the order to the mainland by telegraph and the message would arrive at its destination in an instant.

Until a winter storm swept in on January 2nd, 1910, which severed the telegraph cable and isolated the Iles de la Madeleine.

The Madeleinots waited for a sign from Canada’s government that their only connection with the mainland was going to be restored.

They waited for any sign that the rest of the country had noticed that they were missing.

And they waited.

They waited for days.

They waited for weeks.

As January turned into February they came to the sickening realisation that nobody had even noticed that nothing had been heard from any of the 6000 people living on the Iles de la Madeleine.

This was bitterly frustrating for the Madelinots, because they had long felt ignored and forgotten by Canadian government officials in far away Ottawa.

However, it felt like an extra slap in the face this time, because their local freshly elected ambitious young new Member of Parliament was Rudolph Lemieux, who was Canada’s Postmaster General.

That means that the top person in all of Canada whose job it was to maintain communications with the islands was also the islands own local representative. So it was literally Rudolph Lemieux’s job twice over to notice that the communications to the Iles de la Madeleine had been cut, but he hadn’t for over a month.

As January ended with no sign of contact with the outside world, the Madeleinots held a meeting to decide what to do.

The multi-linguistic, multinational population of the seven islands assembled at a boisterous meeting to figure out how to get the government’s attention.

You’ve heard of messages in bottles?

Well, they decided to send a message in a molasses barrel to the mainland – or, to be more specific a message in a ponchon.

But it would take more than a plain old molasses barrel to make it 96 kilometers away to Cape Breton!

This ponchon would require a sail, as Charles Boudreau later remembered in a 1964 interview:

“The sail was made of sheet iron made by R. J. Leslie Company, which still makes pipes here today. It was a square sail, based on the kinds we saw on the big three masted ships.”

However, attaching the sail to a mast that would go on the ponchon without breaking it was difficult:

“The sail finished, it took a mast to support it but it was impossible to attach a wooden mast because the water could have entered the nail hole. We therefore needed an iron mat made into the shape of a square, which our blacksmith, William Reid, … provided … while also making the mat.”

According to Charles Boudreau, the most difficult part was building it a rudder:

“It was impossible to attach a rudder made of wood like we had on all our other boats; the sea and the water would get into the ponchon by the holes from the nails. It was during this discussion about the rudder, which we certainly needed on the ponchon to keep it from simply turning around and around in the sea, it was then that mister Patrick Brophy found himself coming to visit us. [He heard our conversation and said] that he had such a piece of iron, a five-foot long piece of iron from the railway, and that he’d give it to us for free if we thought it could be useful. … that worked best – it worked as a rudder and a keel and a ballast all at the same time that held the front of the ponchon up out of the water [just like a sailing ship.]”

In large letters on the sheet metal sail the words WINTER MAGDALEN MAIL.

“We put it in English because if ever that ponchon made land it would certainly be land inhabited by the English.”

Inside the ponchon would be a bunch of sealed tin cans.

Inside the tin cans would be a bunch of letters.

And inside of the letters would be pleas for help.

One letter in the ponchon written by Georges Savage to his father on the mainland began by saying ”I am writing you this letter, but I can’t tell you if you’ll receive it because it is being sent in a ponchon. The cable is broken and there is no way to send the news, so we thought of trying this. Et bien, our winter is pretty mild. Tout va bien.”

The main point of Georges’ letter to his dad was to send a shopping list for things he would need by late Spring, when fishing began, specifically bait for his lobster traps.

In another letter that was enclosed in the ponchon, Vergine Chevrier Painchaud wrote:

“I entrust these lines to the randomness of the waves, although honestly the likelihood that they’ll arrive at their destination is a slim reality. If necessity is the mother of joyful invention, then what audacious enterprises does it take to break the chains of a long winter captivity?”

After work was completed, the letters were sealed up as the ponchon was readied to set sail.

Vergine Chevrier Painchaud noted this in her letter, writing:

“The contraption is ready: a barrel sailing, equipped with an iron rudder … held with hope that it will hold its ship in position so that it reaches somewhere. Our letters are sealed and waterproof. At 2 o’clock this afternoon, the launch of this “fantastic” vessel will take place … the wind is favourable and blessed be the one who will first come to the rescue of our frail vessel that will carry the sign “WINTER MAGDALEN MAIL.” ”

February Second was the holiday of Le Chandeleur, which in English is Candlemas. Originally it was a religious holiday, by the early 1900s, it had evolved into a big party that involved eating a lot of crepes.

The tradition back then was that while cooking the crepes everyone would take a turn at holding the pan with the crepe in them in your left hand, while holding a coin in your right hand. If you were able to flip the crepe and land it in the pan one-handed while holding the coin it meant that you were going to have good luck in the coming year.

In the afternoon of February 2nd, 1910 right before the Chandeleur/Candlemas crepe flipping party, Madelinots gathered that day on the beach outside the little fishing village of Havre-Albert to watch the launching of the ponchon.

Hundreds of people gathered to watch as brave and cold men waded out into the icy water with the ponchon, and with great ceremony and high hopes that it would make it to the mainland they released it …

… and it promptly flipped over, its metal sail flipping to the bottom, and got stuck on the rocks.

The weight was too top-heavy. The ponchon was dragged out of the water, as locals began arguing over how to best add weight to the bottom and rearrange the contents to make it stay upright in the water.

For hours, increasingly tense and irate Madelinots tinkered with the ponchon on the cold, wet, icy beach, in the high winds and freezing February weather.

Gradually the crowds got hungry and wandered home to prepare the crepes.

The beach was nearly empty, the sun was almost set, and the crepes weregetting cold by the time the frail little ponchon was finally launched into the sea. The wind caught its thin sail and it bobbed off into the dusk and disappeared from sight.

Everyone returned to their homes for their Candlemas crepes without a great deal of hope that their little ponchon was going anywhere.

A Cape Bretoner was walking along a beach ten days later when he spotted a giant molasses barrel welded into this massive weird metal sailing ship complete with a sheet metal sail, complete with a five-foot-long iron rudder made from a railway tie-washed up on the beach in front of you washed up on the beach.

As a Cape Bretoner back then they were unlikely to speak French, and probably don’t speak English either – the most used language then was Gaelic. In this barrel, there is a grand total of 125 of these sealed cans containing 125 letters in strange foreign languages.

He takes it upon himself to open up all of those 125 sealed cans, take out those 125 individual letters and bring them to his local post office, where he paid for 125 stamps for them.

It would have set him back, in today's money, nearly $200!

The local post office in Cape Breton doesn’t find anything unusual about any of this and the 125 letters from one unusual mailing location also pass onwards and through the main Cape Breton post office in Port Hastings without raising any eyebrows.

It was only when all those letters got to Halifax that finally a postal worker flagged up the unusual development with Nova Soctia’s Postal Inspector General who, on Valentine’s Day 1910, raised the alarm to the government and the press that nobody had heard from the Iles de la Madeleine, home to 6000 Canadian citizens, for a month and a half.

As for the Cape Bretoner, he did get rewarded; he received $30 for what he did, which is several thousand dollars in today’s money. So I guess kindness really does pay off.

As for Rudolph Lemieux, the Postmaster General who was also the Member of Parliament representing the Iles de la Madeleine who had failed to notice his constituents disappearing, he, perhaps unsurprisingly, lost the next election.

Rather unphased, he simply ran in a different riding in the next election and won.

Once again though he was too busy climbing the ladder of Canadian politics to pay attention to his constituents, and lost again.

Completely unphased, he ran again, this time in urban Montreal where maybe they don’t care as much about local representation as in Atlantic Canada and won, this time repeatedly.

He went on to successfully become the Speaker of the House of Commons for eight years, and he remains to this day the second-longest tenured Parliamentary Speaker in Canadian history.

So while being an absent elected official might fly some places, that kind of thing doesn't fly in Atlantic Canada.