Page:Tourist's Maritime Provinces.djvu/335

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ST. JOHN—MONCTON—DALHOUSIE
279

and fish industry. More than 125,000,000 feet of sawed timber goes out of these ports in a year. The two northwest townships of the County of Northumberland have an area of a million and a half acres, of which only a thirtieth part is inhabited, the remainder being an almost trackless forest interlaced by lake and river. Here the moose is suzerain and man the intruder.

At Bathurst, 122 miles northwest of Moncton, Joseph Cunard once had a shipyard on the estuary of the Nepisiguit River. Nicolas Denys, a still earlier inhabitant of neighbouring shores, spelled this Indian name for "rough water," Nepigiguit. Somewhere on the border of Nepisiguit Bay he is thought to be buried. We have his own record that he had a habitation "sur le bord de ce basin." Probably it was to Ferguson's Point that he retired in 1672 "aprés l'incendie de mon Fort de St. Pierre en l'Isle du Cap Breton." His house was guarded by a palisade with four bastions and he had "a spacious garden."

Summer attractions are not wanting within the confines of so well-situated a town as Bathurst, but the traveller who breaks his journey here will do so with the main intention of seeing the Falls of the Nepisiguit. A mining road from a junction ten minutes' ride south of Bathurst carries one to the Pabineau Rapids and up to the cataract. The distance of 20 miles may also be covered by motor-car. "The roaring, destroying giant" of